Saquon Barkley’s most passionate comment Sunday night in Jersey City was his last one.
While lamenting teams’ suppression of the running back market by using the franchise tag, Barkley pivoted into a detailed explanation of why not every running back’s situation is identical.
Every team is, in his words, “different.”
“There’s a [stat] that goes up about quarterbacks in the Super Bowl and how many rushing yards the top rusher [has], but every team is not — like Pat Mahomes is a two-time Super bowl MVP, two-time MVP. And not everybody has Pat Mahomes,” Barkley said at his AMPT Events kids’ football camp. “And this is no knock to Daniel Jones. So don’t even try to flip it like that.
“And then you look at the Eagles,” Barkley added. “Jalen Hurts is a great quarterback. That team is amazing. But every team is not the Eagles. Every team don’t have that much talent.”
That’s when Barkley dissected his place on the Giants.
“When you come to my situation,” he said, “when you come to me personally, I feel like I helped our team a lot. I feel like not only on the field but off the field … [and] as a leader. Obviously there’s a conversation about my numbers going down. I think there’s a whole lot of other stuff that happened to play [into that].
“We were a one-dimensional team in the beginning of the season,” an emotional Barkley said. “We were running the ball. We have a great coach. We played the Detroit Lions. They came in, bust[ed] that ass, stopped me, and we had to switch it up. We have a great coach, with [Brian Daboll] and [offensive coordinator Mike Kafka], and we had a whole new game plan. We came out and found a way to get the job done and make it to the playoffs.”
The Giants were 7-2 in their first nine regular season games using that one-dimensional, run-heavy offense and 2-5-1 after. So Barkley makes a strong case.
What’s missing from his argument so far, however, are the specifics of the contract offers he has turned down that haven’t shown him enough “respect.”
Barkley and his agent made the decision to stay quiet from January through May about the Giants contract negotiations. Barkley thought that discretion would be honored both ways, and he believes it wasn’t.
But broken trust doesn’t change the fact that Barkley was the one who had to defend himself on Sunday against the public perception that he already turned down big money.
He intimated that the guaranteed money in those reported contract offers was much lower than the leaks portrayed.
“I said I’m not trying to reset the market. I said I wanted to be a Giant for life. So I’ll let you guys read in between the lines for that,” Barkley said.
Barkley is still fighting an uphill public relations battle, though.
In January, a source said Barkley had turned down a three-year offer worth between $12-12.5 million per year on average. In May, NJ Advance Media reported the Giants had increased that number to $13 million a year after the season with incentives that would get it to $14 million.
Barkley’s agent, Kim Miale of Roc Nation, only commented publicly once in May in response to the assertion that Barkley was holding firm on a $16 million a year ask.
“This is not true,” Miale tweeted on May 13.
But it would be helpful to know if Giants GM Joe Schoen’s offers were full of per-game roster bonuses, or low guaranteed money, or an escape hatch after year one, or some other poison pill that no one could blame Barkley for balking at and sending back.
Right now, public perception unfortunately remains largely unsympathetic to running backs as a whole and even to Barkley, it seems. Large swaths of Giants fans on social media are restless that Barkley hasn’t accepted the alleged offers they’ve heard about.
That’s why Barkley took up for all running backs on Sunday; not just himself.
“What I will say about the running back market and the value of it: what do you think is gonna happen? They tagged the top 3 guys,” he said, referring to the Raiders’ Josh Jacobs, the Cowboys’ Tony Pollard and himself. “We didn’t get a chance to hit the open market. So when we don’t get the chance to hit the open market, it hurts a guy like Miles [Sanders in free agency]. It hurts all those other guys. They put the cap at 10 [million].
“I think it’s not fair,” Barkley said of this market development. “Because the Tennessee Titans are a great team, but Derrick Henry is one of those guys on those teams. San Francisco is a great team, but Christian McCaffrey is one of those guys on the team. Josh Jacobs, the list goes on and on.
“And I think when you talk about the New York Giants, even peers came out and said it: I have a lot of respect in this league,” he said. “And I think that’s how I should be viewed.”
The best outcome here, of course, would be for the Giants and Barkley to find a middle ground and get a multi-year extension done.
Assuming this standoff drags on, though, the lingering question is just how misleading those contract leaks were, what the contract offers actually contained, and if the truth would flip the public perception battle back in the Giants’ laps for nickel-and-diming an important player.
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