Tim McManus
PHILADELPHIA — Saquon Barkley sat on a foam mat in the middle of the Eagles’ locker room after their 21-17 loss to the Denver Broncos on Sunday with anti-inflammatory belts strapped around his legs.
A return trip to the Meadowlands for Thursday night’s game against his former team, the New York Giants, was days away, and Barkley was one of the few Eagles players enjoying a quick recovery to account for the short week.
It’s been a tough turnaround for Barkley, 28, who left the Broncos game with knee soreness that put him on the injury report. He’s still expected to play against the team that selected him second overall in 2018 and ultimately let him go during the 2024 offseason — a decision that had a seismic impact on the entire league.
It was a rocky start for the reigning Offensive Player of the Year after a dream campaign in which he set a new NFL record for rushing yards, including the playoffs, and served as a jet pack for an Eagles team that won 16 of its final 17 games to capture its second Lombardi Trophy.
Barkley ranks 25th in yards per carry per game (53.4) and 39th in yards per carry (3.2). Outside of his injury-shortened 2020 season, his 1.9 yards before contact per carry, 1.3 yards after contact per carry and 3.2 yards per carry are all career lows through his team’s first five games of the season.
With their primary method of offense from a year ago not working optimally, the 4-1 Eagles enter their NFC East matchup against the Giants still trying to figure out what type of offense they’ll put together. They’re looking for ways to unlock Barkley as he draws more attention from opposing defenses as well as attrition along the offensive line, and battles a history that hasn’t always been kind to 2,000-yard backs.
“Every year is not going to be like last year,” Barkley said. “It shouldn’t be like this. Football is not easy, football is difficult. It’s a difficult sport. You play against a lot of talented players.
“It’s something you have to love. Just like you love running for 200 yards and scoring three touchdowns, you have to enjoy your process even when things aren’t going the way you want them to. You go back to your process and you let those things take over and eventually it will turn around.”
Barkley’s confidants — a group that includes Eagles coaches, mentors and Hall of Fame backs like Marshall Faulk and Edgerrin James — all had the same message for him following his high-volume Super Bowl season.
“Everyone I trust told me to sit down a little bit,” Barkley said during the offseason.
That meant resisting the urge to spring into action every time a clip of Derrick Henry running hills or Christian McCaffrey working out popped up on his timeline like it did in the past.
Barkley’s workload was no joke in ’24. He finished the regular season with a season-high 345 carries — 50 more than his previous record of 295 set in 2022 — and did it 91 more times in the postseason.
“Maybe ‘relax’ isn’t a term I would use, but your training plan needs to change,” running backs coach Jemal Singleton said. “(When you go to the Super Bowl), everything gets pushed back and when it gets pushed back, it goes straight to training camp.
“So part of it is, ‘Hey, let’s be smart. You just played 21 games. You just did a bunch of carries, played a bunch of reps, let’s make sure that physically you build up to it slowly.’
The following year’s numbers for the select group of backs who reached the 2,000 rushing yard mark are telling: None reached 1,500 yards the following season, and the previous eight saw their yards per carry decrease by an average of about a yard and a half – Barkley’s fell by 2.6 at that point.
Now in his eighth season in the NFL, Barkley is working against all odds on multiple fronts when it comes to running back production.
“Well, the challenge is you’re not 21 years old,” said former Eagles running back Brian Westbrook, who racked up more than 10,000 all-purpose yards during his nine-year career and appeared in five different playoff runs, including Philadelphia’s appearance in the Super Bowl during the 2004 season. react.”
“And when you add the 2,000 yards to that and a long playoff run on top of that, that’s an extra month and a half of football. It takes a toll on you and it’s harder to come back from as you get older. I guess he’s not quite the same, but no one is. It’s hard to get better as you go through years six, seven and eight, not many running backs in particular do. Saquon has already passed the test of time having the good season he had last year.
The wear and tear can “make your legs a little heavier, and cut them less quickly,” but the film doesn’t suggest that’s currently happening with Barkley, Westbrook said.
Instead, the root of the problem is a combination of injuries along the offensive front and defenses finding new and improved ways to slow down the Eagles’ ground game.
Center Cam Jurgens has just undergone back surgery. Left guard Landon Dickerson underwent meniscus surgery on his right knee in August and left last week’s game against the Broncos with an injured ankle. Right tackle Lane Johnson missed parts of two games with a stinger.
Last year, the Eagles offensive line helped Barkley average a league-high 4.2 yards before contact per carry. This year, that number dropped to 1.9, ranking him 28th out of 42 qualified guards.
“I think we’re used to, based on the last three or four years, assuming that the Eagles’ offensive line is the best in the league that they’ve been, but they haven’t played at that level this year,” said Greg Cosell, NFL analyst and senior producer at NFL Films. “And you could even argue that they played at a level that is probably the bottom half of the league, as opposed to the top half of the league.
“And I think Barkley has always been the type of runner, even going back to his Penn State days, that when it’s not clean at the point of attack at the first level, he tends to be a seeker and a spotter. So there are plays on tape where you can see that he’s leaving yards on the field because instead of just taking what’s there, which might just be a three or four yard gain, he’s then looking for the big play that happened last year, well sure, so many times. “
Worse yet, Barkley faces boxes of more than eight players on 30.1% of his carries, according to NFL Next Gen stats, compared to 20.6% last season.
“That’s going to be the theme this year. You’d be a fool to let us into any stadium…and your goal is not to stop the race,” Barkley said. “And if that’s the case, we’re going to burn you for it.”
The Eagles had the luxury in 24 of salting ground games in the second half. Barkley averaged a league-high 6.7 yards per carry in the second half last season, while the Eagles’ second-half designed run percentage was a league-high 59%. This year, he’s averaging 2.6 yards/carry in the second half (40th out of 44 qualifying players), while the Eagles’ designed run percentage has dropped to 46%.
The Eagles have seen teams come back at them late in games each of the last two weeks, including a Denver team that scored 18 points in the fourth quarter to hand Philadelphia its first loss of the season.
One thing the Broncos game showed was Barkley’s skills as a receiver. He broke loose on a wheel route early in the third quarter and hauled in a deep pass from Jalen Hurts for a 47-yard touchdown.
“I think it’s something we can continue to develop, especially with a lot of teams focusing on the running game,” Barkley said. “I feel like I’m out of step with the linebackers, but we have so many talented players here.”
The Eagles really tried to get the passing game going last week amid growing frustrations from AJ Brown and the receiving corps. The flip side was that Barkley only carried the ball six times, his lowest total since 2021.
This is a departure from the formula that worked so well for the Eagles last season and not how they want to operate moving forward.
Barkley has publicly stated that he wants to become the “greatest of all time.” Becoming the first player to rush for 2,000 yards in consecutive seasons would certainly put him in the conversation. But just as he stopped his pursuit of Eric Dickerson’s regular-season rushing record last season for the sake of trying to win a Super Bowl, he’s more concerned with the recipe that will equal the most team success — something Philadelphia will continue to seek this week at MetLife Stadium.
“I don’t ask myself, ‘What, are we doing enough?’” he said. “My job is to win football matches.”
