Saquon Barkley would be risking a lot if he held out this season. The Giants also would be risking a lot if they dared him to.
There are internal and external expectations for the Giants to build on last season’s playoff berth and Wild Card round victory. They paid Daniel Jones, traded for Darren Waller and spent plenty of capital on defense, and there is optimism in East Rutherford.
Those good feelings could quickly and easily evaporate, however, if Barkley and the Giants don’t reach a deal by the July 17 deadline and the team’s top offensive player doesn’t show up for the start of training camp.
Barkley’s absence would become a daily distraction. It would put pressure on head coach Brian Daboll to keep his locker room focused. And more concretely, it would threaten the Giants’ ability to put their best possible team on the field this fall.
For all of those reasons, it’s difficult to believe that Giants co-owner John Mara would allow this standoff to reach a point of no return.
As much as Mara is trusting GM Joe Schoen to rebuild his roster and make the tough decisions to get there, would Mara really sign off on drawing such a hard line on Barkley that it jeopardizes the team’s ability to win and advance in 2023?
Not to mention there could be more of the fallout that has already begun: Barkley’s decision to publicly vent his frustrations about the Giants allegedly leaking misleading contract information could just be the tip of the iceberg.
There aren’t many secrets in the NFL, and especially when players feel like they’ve been misled or disrespected, word travels quickly.
This isn’t a simple negotiation, though, which is why it’s dragging on.
Veteran running back Dalvin Cook, for example, just got released by the Minnesota Vikings. And Cook’s agent believes he might land a free agent contract averaging around $9 million per year, according to former NFL GM Michael Lombardi on the “GM Shuffle” podcast.
In that kind of market, why would Schoen feel compelled to go way higher than the $10 million, one-year franchise tag number for Barkley?
The GM’s primary charge other than winning games is to clean up the Giants’ salary cap. If he’s trying to be smart with money and stay true to the market, that logic makes sense.
As assistant GM Brandon Brown said Tuesday: “I just think precedent sets the market. We don’t control it. What we do is try to forecast and react. And the market is the market.”
That logic clearly makes sense to Mara, too. The club’s co-owner backed Schoen’s approach to the Barkley talks in March at the NFL’s owners meetings, walking stride for stride with the GM’s hardline stance.
“We want you to be one of the leaders of this team, want you to be one of the faces of this franchise,” Mara said of his message to Barkley. “But there’s a limit as to how far we can go. We have to build a team around you. And we’ve gotten just about as far as we can.”
The Giants have offered more than the franchise tag tender in an average annual contract to Barkley, of course, as well. The problem from Barkley’s perspective, though, is that the numbers that have been leaked are misleading and disrespectful to his value.
Think of it this way: if Barkley played the 2023 and 2024 seasons for the Giants on back-to-back franchise tags, he would make $22.2 million.
So if the Giants offered him a three-year, $36 million contract extension in February that averaged $13 million per season, but it hypothetically contained only $18 million guaranteed with per-game bonuses that protected the team, why would he accept a deal that cost him at least $4.2 million over two years?
This is how the franchise tag gives the Giants leverage.
In that scenario, the tag’s $10 million tender could pigeon-hole a player like Barkley, because he realizes it would actually be more lucrative with those options to just play on the tag for two straight years.
As Barkley said, the ability of the Cowboys, Raiders and Giants to tag running backs Tony Pollard, Josh Jacobs and Barkley helped suppress the market in the first place. Unfortunately, however, that collectively bargained mechanism often leaves the players with limited options.
Plus, if there is no contract extension by 4 p.m. on July 17, Barkley can only play on the franchise tag number for the Giants this season. His only option for a multi-year deal after that date and time would be a tag-and-trade to another team.
We’re not there quite yet.
It’s hard to believe it will get that far, though, because it is well known that Mara values Barkley as the face of his franchise, not just as a major contributor on his team. The club’s co-owner doesn’t want to lose that.
The belief is that Jones will continue to grow into the standout quarterback that season-ticket holders pay to see. But it was strange, when the Giants announced their Legacy Uniform games in mid-May, to see no images of Barkley anywhere on the team’s promotions.
Jones, Dexter Lawrence and Kayvon Thibodeaux were the featured players on one advertisement. Another pushed Xavier McKinney and Azeez Ojulari.
No Barkley. Number 26 had been wiped off the marquee.
Maybe Mara and the Giants really are prepared to hold their ground. They have the leverage, so it makes sense that they’ve used it. The power balance could shift here in a hurry, however, if Barkley is truly prepared to hold out once the football starts.
Because Mara knows that while running backs are viewed as replaceable in the modern NFL team, Barkley is not replaceable on the 2023 version of his Giants.
Mara knows his fans still primarily are paying to see Barkley’s burst. Mara has come to rue the last time he cast aside his team’s most marketable player.
And it’s difficult to imagine he will allow it to happen again.
The Giants on Thursday signed defensive tackle Kobe Smith, 24, a 2020 undrafted free agent out of South Carolina who has spent time with four NFL teams but hasn’t yet played in a game. Smith gives the team training camp depth with interior linemen A’Shawn Robinson, Vernon Butler and D.J. Davidson rehabbing or nursing ailments as the spring program wrapped up. The team waived/injured wide receiver/ tight end Dre Miller in a corresponding move.
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