Earlier this offseason, NFL executives, coaches and scouts named New York Giants running back Saquon Barkley the best at his position league-wide.
That decision wasn’t surprising and seems obvious to many, but not all.
Retired NFL running back Maurice Jones-Drew disputed that and ranked Barkley outside of his top five in July, and he’s now been joined by our colleague, Doug Farrar of Touchdown Wire.
In his recent rankings of NFL running backs, Barkley was not only left out of Farrar’s top five, but he was dropped all the way down to No. 7.
We thought it was a mistake, but it wasn’t.
Barkley’s 2019 season was mostly a disappointment after he led the NFL with 2,028 yards from scrimmage in his rookie campaign. A high ankle sprain diminished his effectiveness for much of his second season, and the nadir of that was his 13-carry, one-yard performance against the Jets in Week 10 where he couldn’t bounce outside, he was missing three starters on the offensive line, and his own pass protection was uncharacteristically awful.
Barkley started to put it back together near the end of the season, averaging 108.4 yards per game in December after a November in which he tallied just 29.3 yards per contest. The hope in 2020 is that a healthy Barkley will align with fourth-overall pick Andrew Thomas on an improved front five, new offensive coordinator Jason Garrett will add continuity to the run game (no sure thing there), and Barkley will return to form. At his peak, he’s one of the quickest and most elusive backs in the game, and his receiving ability forces defenses to do… well, more than whatever the Washington Football Team was doing on this 33-yard touchdown pass from Daniel Jones.
Farrar isn’t necessarily down on Barkley, but has reached the conclusion that the 23-year-old not quite as transcendent as we assumed throughout his rookie year.
Barkley isn’t as quite as transcendent as one might have assumed in his rookie season, but he’s better than what he showed in the middle of the 2019 season when it seemed that everything possible was aligned against him. His third season will say a lot about his future potential.
Barkley obviously struggled through his injury in 2019 and his production suffered due to his insistence on returning early. By all accounts, that’s done nothing but motivate the third-year pro, who will enter training camp in the best shape of his life and a chip on his shoulder.
We’ll see what Farrar, MJD and others have to say after Barkley lights up the league here in 2020.
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