PHILADELPHIA — When the lights went out in the New York Giants’ defensive meeting room this week, and the film popped on the screen, the players saw something they’d seen before. The speed, the power, the elusiveness, it was all still obvious.
Saquon Barkley still looked as good and dangerous as he’s ever been.
“He’s definitely the same threat he used to be,” Giants edge rusher Brian Burns said. “I don’t think there’s any slack of his talent.”
“He’s definitely the same threat if you watch the tape,” defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence added. “Numbers don’t always show that, but the tape does.”
Players will insist that the tape doesn’t lie, but Lawrence is right: It sure does tell a different story than what the Philadelphia Eagles star looks like on the stat sheet. It’s not just that Barkley’s numbers are down following his 2024 Offensive Player of the Year campaign.
It’s that they’ve cratered into an unimaginable hole.
“I’m still the same player,” Barkley insisted this week. “I try my best not to get too caught up in the numbers thing. I don’t think it defines me as a player. I still know what I bring to the table.”
By every measure, though, the 28-year-old Barkley is simply not the same player he was a year ago when he became the ninth player in NFL history to rush for 2,000 yards during the regular season, hitting 2,005 in 16 games. This year, he’s averaging 3.3 yards per carry, a massive decline from the 5.8 he averaged a year ago. He’s averaging 52.7 yards per game, not even half of the 125.3 he averaged last year.
His longest run has been for 47 yards, one season after he had seven touchdown runs that went for longer than 60 in the regular season and playoffs (an NFL record). He’s also still searching for his first 100-yard game — and in four of his seven games he’s been held under 50 — one year after he topped 100 in 14 of 20 games, and topped 200 yards twice.
Saquon Barkley broke the NFL’s combined single-season rushing record with 2,504 yards (including postseason) in 2024. (Photo by Megan Briggs/Getty Images)
And then there is the most concerning number of all. One season after coming within 100 yards of the NFL’s all-time single-season rushing record — a record he likely would have broken if the Eagles didn’t hold him out in Week 18 — Barkley might not even reach half that total.
He’s currently on pace for just 896 yards.
Barkley said from the start of the season he didn’t expect to duplicate his 2024 numbers. But clearly he didn’t expect a drop-off like this.
“Like I said coming into this season, ‘It’s going to look different,’” Barkley said. “I wish it didn’t look like this right now. But we’re winning football games.”
The Eagles are, which is remarkable considering their once powerful rushing game now ranks 30th in the league. They’re 5-2 and sitting atop the NFC East heading into another showdown on Sunday against Barkley’s old team. But they’ve gotten there by averaging just 88.1 yards per game on the ground — less than half of the 179.3 they averaged in the regular season last year.
That’s not all because of Barkley, but it certainly has raised a huge concern about a player who is still the reigning NFL Offensive Player of the Year. Despite what is on film, he is simply not as effective as he used to be.
“[Barkley] is going to always take accountability. That’s why you love him and that’s why you respect him so much, is that he wants it to be on him,” Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said. “But in the actuality of football, it’s on all of us. We all have to do a better job to get it going. We know that’s something that we always want to rely on. We’re working like crazy to figure it out.”
The dip is not a complete mystery. In fact, some regression was expected. After all, none of the previous eight players to rush for 2,000 yards in a season even reached 1,500 yards the next year.
But it may be less about the yards than it is about the pounding that came with them. Between his remarkable regular season and the Eagles’ Super Bowl run, Barkley was probably overused last season. He finished with 482 touches — 105 more than his previous career high.
Will Barkley recapture his star form? The Eagles will eventually need it. They’re one of six NFC teams with a 5-2 record heading into Week 8. (Photo by Elizabeth Flores/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)
And history has simply not been kind to running backs who touch the ball that much and take the number of hits that come along with that workload. In the past 10 seasons, only six running backs have had more than 400 touches in a single season. Of those, only Ezekiel Elliott didn’t get injured or regress the next season. In 2018, the Cowboys running back touched the ball 433 times (350 rushes, 83 catches) and totaled 2,236 yards in 17 games, including the playoffs.
The next year, he touched the ball an impressive 355 times for 1,777 in 15 games.
Elliott is the exception, though. The rule is more like Christian McCaffrey, who topped 400 touches in 2019 in Carolina and again in 2023 in San Francisco. He followed up his 403-touch season in Carolina by playing in just 10 games over the next two seasons. And after his 417-touch season in San Francisco, he was limited to four games in another injury-plagued year.
Barkley is at least healthy. But he’s on a steep statistical fall similar to one Eagles fans are familiar with. In 2014, DeMarco Murray touched the ball 497 times in 18 games for the Dallas Cowboys and rushed for a league-high 1,845 yards during the regular season. The next year, after signing a huge contract with Philadelphia, Murray battled a hamstring injury, was largely ineffective, lost his starting job and finished with just 193 carries for 702 yards.
But history isn’t the only thing working against Barkley. The Eagles’ offensive line has been battered by injuries that have caused them to shuffle the lineup during games several times. Left guard Landon Dickerson missed Week 6 against the Giants with an ankle injury. Center Cam Jurgens, who has struggled, suffered a knee injury last week and could miss Sunday’s game. Philly also entered the season with a new right guard, with Tyler Steen stepping in for free-agent departure Mekhi Becton.
Turnover and injuries are never good for an offensive line, even one as good and deep as the one in Philadelphia. Last year, with a relatively consistent group in front of him, Barkley averaged an astonishing 3.8 yards per carry before contact.
This year he’s averaging just 1.8 yards before he takes his first hit — a number that harkens back to his difficult days with the Giants playing behind one of the league’s worst offensive lines.
Not that Barkley would ever blame his line.
“I’ve got to do a better job of not taking negative runs,” he said after rushing 18 times for just 44 yards in a 28-22 win in Minnesota this past Sunday. “I keep saying that, and I sound like a broken record, but that’s something I’ve got to do. I own it.”
Barkley is averaging less than half the yards before contact this season (1.8) that he was in 2024 (3.8) with the Eagles. (Photo by Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images)
There’s also the question of the way he’s being used under new offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo. No one expected Barkley to be used as heavily as he was a year ago, when he recorded career highs of 21.6 carries and 23.6 touches per game. But the drop-off has been remarkable. He’s averaging 5.5 fewer carries and 4.5 fewer touches. In a 21-17 loss to the Broncos on Oct. 5, he carried the ball just six times — and only once in the second half.
Sirianni said “obviously” the Eagles want to run Barkley more than that because, “You always want to come out of that game with Saquon getting enough touches for the type of player he is.” But then he registered 30 carries (for 102 yards) over the next two weeks.
Barkley knows that’s not enough. And he knows that’s not the identity the Eagles want to establish on offense.
“I think we shouldn’t let a team or a defense dictate how we perform,” he said. “I do know it’s the NFL, and you’ve got to give credit, but I do have so much confidence in myself and in this team that we should be able to find a way to get it going.”
And that should happen, he believes, no matter what those defenses are doing. Several Eagles said they’ve noticed defenders inching closer to the line of scrimmage this season and moving quicker to clog Barkley’s running lanes. But it’s not like defenses didn’t know Barkley and the run was coming at them last season. The Eagles ran on 55.7% of their plays during the regular season in 2024 (compared to 46.15% so far this season).
The difference was that Barkley and the Eagles were unstoppable on the ground last year.
So, what’s the difference this year? That’s a question everyone’s asking in Philadelphia these days, and to an extent, so are many around the league. Barkley admits he doesn’t have a good answer.
And, to an extent, he doesn’t really care.
“I’m not really a big numbers guy. I never really was good at numbers in school either,” Barkley said. “I do know we have to be more efficient in the run game, and that’s something we’re focusing on. But at the end of the day, our whole goal is to win another football game. That’s the only thing that matters. I just want to go out there and, first and foremost, win. It doesn’t matter how it looks for me.
“But the competitor in me, I get it. I know if we get the running game going and we throw the ball the way we’ve been doing, we’re going to be a hard team to stop.”
Ralph Vacchiano is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He spent six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him on Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.
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