Super Bowl Saquon is for all the stars who never made it to a second team

Most NFL players are stuck with the team that drafted them for their entire prime. Thankfully, Saquon went from a team where he could never shine to a team optimized for his brilliant talents.

I’m a New York Jets fan. That means in the past two years, I’ve gotten to watch my team add one of the most talented, most successful quarterbacks of all time, who promptly sucked when playing for our team. Meanwhile two of our former draft picks, Geno Smith and Sam Darnold, have become effective starters for other teams. I have become convinced that the Jets exist on the NFL’s severed basement floor. Players can have normal careers before or after they come down here, but their talent leaves their bodies in the elevator down to the Jets.

Most of my friends are Giants fans. I’m generally jealous of them because their team has won two legendary Super Bowls in our lifetimes while mine has not even played in one. But now, I’m watching them cope with a truly devious fandom experience: watching their former star, Saquon Barkley, lead their biggest rivals, the Eagles¹, to the Super Bowl.

The Giants’ decision to let Barkley go was prominently featured on the first season of HBO’s Hard Knocks: Offseason, and has turned out so poorly that I don’t think they’ll be able to film a second season of Hard Knocks: Offseason, because the other 31 teams will be worried they’ll do something that makes them look this stupid. Saquon went on to have the best season of his career. He led the league with 2,005 yards, becoming the ninth player in league history to hit 2K in a season, while posting career highs in yards per attempt (5.8) and touchdowns. Meanwhile, the Giants went 3-14.

Saquon has just gotten more unstoppable in the postseason. In the divisional round against the Rams, Barkley ran for 205 yards, more than he had in any of his 76 career games with the Giants. In the NFC championship game against the Commanders, he had three touchdowns… also more than he had in any of his 76 career games with the Giants. With the Super Bowl, he will have played twice as many playoff games in one year in Philly than he did in six years in New York.

Also, he HURDLED A GUY BACKWARDS.

@nflukireSTOP THAT SAQUON BARKLEY 🫨 Barkley with the unbelievable hurdle against the Jags last night 🫣 @Philadelphia Eagles #philadelphia #philadelphiaeagles #HURDLE #nfl #saquonbarkley #backwardshurdle

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Holy crap, dude. That’s, like, the coolest thing any football player has ever done for as long as I have watched football. Holy hell. Sheesh.

All this makes Giants management look preposterously stupid, which is good, because they are. But I think it’s simplistic to view the Saquon renaissance as New York letting the best running back in the league walk away. Saquon wasn’t the best running back in the league with the Giants, and he never could have been. Thankfully, he got something so few NFL players get: A chance to find the place where he could achieve his full potential.

Saquon was never this good on the Giants—and he never could’ve been.

Football is a stunningly complex game, and it’s easy to see how interconnected every player’s success is to the other 10 on their team. We’ve all watched quarterbacks stuck behind lines that can’t protect and receivers getting open for quarterbacks who couldn’t hit Victor Wembanyama from the free throw line. Sometimes a team has, like, nine good players, and even though the quarterback is dropping dimes and the receivers are wide open and the run game is working and three guys are holding their blocks, the left tackle keeps letting the defensive end through and the whole thing is ruined.

Running back is probably the position most dependent on others. It’s part of why people have taken such strong stances on the value of the position—teams with great running games can plug-and-play undrafted nobodies and still move the ball well on the ground while teams like the Giants can draft talents like Saquon and do nothing.

But something magical happens when a running back like Saquon winds up on a team like the Eagles. Their excellence enables his excellence. Look at his first touchdown run in the conference championship game.²

@thesportingnewsSaquon Barkley really scored a 60-yard touchdown on his first play of the game. #nfl #saquon #eagles #philadelphiaeagles #nflplayoffs

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The play is blocked perfectly, as 370-pound Jordan Mailata leads the way and brolic muscleman-slash-wide receiver A.J. Brown throws a defender to the ground. That causes a pile-up of bodies that picks off defenders like a Big One at Talladega. By the time anybody gets their hand on Barkley, he’s 14 yards downfield. And then he’s Saquon Barkley, a genius in the open field, taking on weak-tackling defensive backs. He breaks through one of their tackles, spins past another, then cuts back for the touchdown.

Saquon on the Giants was like a Formula 1 car without a pit crew, driven by an American teen who doesn’t know how to shift gears. It didn’t really matter that this beautiful machine was capable of spectacular speed and hairpin handling. Under the circumstances, a care like that can never go as fast as it could possibly go. Honestly, it might not make it around the track—and Barkley often didn’t with the Giants.

Barkley’s career high rushing total in six seasons with the Giants was 1,312 yards in 2022. This season, Barkley had 1,328 yards before contact. He had a whole Giants rushing season before anybody could even touch him. That’s not because he got more elusive with age. It’s because the Eagles have the best offensive line in the league, and because their opponents also have to account for the rushing threat of Jalen Hurts.

As a rookie in New York, Barkley was credited with 30 broken tackles on his way to 1,307 rushing yards. This year, he only had 19 broken tackles on over 2,000 rushing yards. Again, this is not because he got worse at breaking tackles with age. It’s because with the Giants, he needed to physically fight his way through defenders just to make anything happen. Incidentally, Barkley’s early career in New York was marred with injuries—he missed 21 games between his torn ACL and three high ankle sprains. He made it through the season injury-free in Philly.

I keep thinking about Saquon’s college career, because Saquon’s college career ruled. Barkley was so brilliant at Penn State that I was able to write an entire post the 26 greatest missed tackles he caused. That’s what he looked like this year, with the Eagles. But Barkley was initially committed to play at Rutgers³. Would Barkley have been able to make all those plays at Rutgers? He certainly wouldn’t have been able to do this in the Rose Bowl, because that requires making the Rose Bowl, which Rutgers cannot do.

Anyway, long story short, the Giants are Rutgers. Sorry for inflicting even more emotional damage on the people of New Jersey.

Most players don’t get a chance to break free like this. (On the field or contractually.)

I’ve been writing about the NFL for over a decade now. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody explain the way the league works as succinctly as my former colleague Matt Ufford, who categorized some teams as “Serious” and others as “Unserious.” It’s more accurate than any film breakdown. Some organizations have their house in order and are capable of putting together winners year after year; others fart away season after season, even though they’re given the best draft slots and have the most cap room. (The Giants: “ironclad certainty that they’re serious as their pants repeatedly fall down, like a clown in a business suit.”)

And if an Unserious team drafts a player, they’re essentially stuck there. After the draft, a player is under wraps for the first five years of their career… and most players don’t even make it to the fifth year of their career. The few players who do have long careers often re-sign⁴ with the team that drafted them, which is the only team they’re even allowed to negotiate with until Year 5. Between that, and the franchise tag, and the general comfort of stasis, players are heavily incentivized to stick with one franchise. If they ever do get to leave, it’s generally after their talents have waned.

Look at this year’s free agency. Of the 10 biggest contracts signed, only one was a player who had ever been named all-Pro at any point in their careers—Danielle Hunter, a second-team all-Pro back in 2018, who had spent the first nine years of his career with the Vikings. He had agreed to a big-time contract extension after his fourth season in the league and was now switching teams for the first time at age 30.

Let’s look at this year’s best players. Of the 12 players named first-team All-Pro on offense by the AP, 10 are still on their first team. The other two: Barkley and Chiefs left guard Joe Thuney. On the second team, it’s 9 of 12. Two of the outliers are Derrick Henry, a running back like Barkley, and A.J. Brown, an Eagle like Barkley… and both players who left the Titans, one of the league’s greatest talent-wasting franchises.

Let’s look at some recent-ish drafts that are now long enough in the past that most of the players have completed their careers. In the five drafts from 2011 to 2015, there were a combined 72 first-round picks who went on to make the Pro Bowl at some point in their careers. 57 of those first-round Pro Bowlers only made the Pro Bowl with the team that drafted them—that’s nearly 80 percent. The number of first-round Pro Bowlers who completed their entire career without ever playing for a team besides the one that drafted them (15) is the same as the number who managed to make a Pro Bowl with a second team.

It’s rare for any star at any position to move while they’re still playing at their best. How often does a highlight-reel superstar like Saquon get to switch teams while they’re still capable of hitting those highs? My former editor, Lindsay Jones, was inspired by Saquon to rank the most impactful post-free agency seasons in the league’s history. Barkley ranked 4th all-time; two guys ahead of him were quarterbacks and the third was Deion Sanders.

The careers of football players do not generally get second acts. Players either get drafted by the team that can set them up for their optimal career, or they aren’t, and there’s not a lot they can do about it. We like to believe in peoples’ ability to overcome their circumstances, that someone’s talent and skill is more important than external factors they can’t control. But in football and America, the truth is harder to stomach.

So this is a celebration.

Watching this year’s Vikings-Giants game, I wrote that watching Smith and Darnold was “like finding out the farm upstate where your parents sent your family pets is actually real and there’s a link to a livestream.”

Sick post, Rodg. Look at all those reposts. Really, crushed it. But I should’ve saved it for Saquon. The Giants had this gorgeous golden retriever cooped up in a New York City apartment⁵. The Eagles, both metaphorically and literally, are capable of getting him into the open field, where he was born to be. Look at him! He’s juking and jumping, smile on his face and defenders in his wake.

Watching Saquon thrive in Philly makes me think about all the players who never got the chance. This is for Calvin Johnson, drafted second overall, who played his whole career for the Lions, only playing in two career playoff games. Had 211 yards in one of ‘em. Still lost. This is for Andre Johnson, drafted third overall by an expansion franchise that would never be good enough for him. This is for Myles Garrett, drafted first overall, now hoping the Browns trade him to a team that will actually make the playoffs. This is for Trevor Lawrence, drafted first overall, likely doomed to spend his entire career playing for the Jacksonville Jaguars. This is for literally every player who has to hear their name after the words “with the Xth pick in the NFL Draft, the New York Jets select…” I love you all, and I am so sorry.

1. Source: Our group chat recently did a “most important NFC East rivalries” power ranking. I don’t remember the exact order, but the Giants fans agreed Giants-Eagles > Giants-Cowboys.

2. A lot of the most important parts of this play are not visible in the TikTok, but the NFL doesn’t let me embed their Youtube videos. Apologies.

3. Probably my #2 “superstar initially committed to a school where they would not have been a superstar” tidbit. #1 is Ja’Marr Chase, Kansas Jayhawk.

4. Someday I am going to find the person who decided “resign” and “re-sign” should be the same word and I am going to give them a really bad paper cut. If no individual person decided this, I will re-sign myself to defeat.

5. I also have two beautiful dogs who love rolling around in the grass and escaping from yards but are unfortunately stuck in my NYC apartment. They’re the best and they deserved a suburban adopter, and they can’t even read the footnotes on my Substack to truly understand how I feel about them.