Is Saquon Barkley Having the Most Impactful Post–Free Agency Season Ever?
The idea of landing a star player in free agency is more of a dream than a reality in the NFL. But Barkley is having a season for the ages—one that puts him up in the company of Drew Brees, Tom Brady, and other players who had standout seasons with new teams.
One of the NFL’s best tricks is convincing football fans to have hope in free agency. The dream each offseason is to land a transformative star, when the reality is that there are far more free agent busts who change teams than truly great players. There are a number of reasons for this: smart teams sign their best players to contract extensions before they ever get a chance to test the open market; teams can use the franchise tag to prevent players from leaving; and teams trade players who are nearing the end of their contracts, and those players sign extensions with their new team.
And the big-name players who do become free agents often have some sort of baggage. Perhaps they’re considered to be old or past their athletic primes, or they’ve got a concerning injury history, or they’ve reached an impasse with their previous teams after months of contentious contract negotiations.
Every so often, though, teams manage to strike gold in free agency. One of those seemingly too-old quarterbacks winds up having a few good years left. Or a younger role player from one team quickly flourishes under a different coaching staff. Or, if you’re the Philadelphia Eagles, you pounce when your division rival badly botches contract negotiations with a beloved star player, and that guy immediately runs for more than 2,000 yards and powers your team to the Super Bowl.
This season, Saquon Barkley has rushed (and reverse-hurdled) his way into the conversation for the best free agent signings in NFL history. And if he continues his remarkable playoff run and caps his first season with the Eagles with a Super Bowl win over the Kansas City Chiefs, he might just take the title for the most impactful first season ever by a free agent.
But who are the other contenders on that list?
For the purposes of this exercise, we’re looking at players who’ve changed teams since 1993, when Reggie White ushered in the NFL’s free agency era. And we’re only considering the player’s first year with his new team, both on an individual level and how he impacted his team’s success. Here’s how they stack up.
1. Drew Brees, 2006 New Orleans Saints
Age: 27
Season stat line: 4,418 passing yards (first in the NFL), 26 touchdowns, 11 interceptions
Individual honors: First team All-Pro, second in MVP voting
Team success: The Saints went from 3-13 in 2005 to 10-6 in 2006 and won the NFC South and advanced to the NFC championship game.
Brees’s first year in New Orleans is what free agent dreams are made of. When he arrived, the Saints had a new head coach in Sean Payton and the city was reeling in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Brees decided to sign with the Saints instead of the Dolphins after Miami’s doctors had questions about his surgically repaired shoulder. And while the Saints didn’t win a Super Bowl in Brees’s first season, the quarterback did more to help heal the city and transform the franchise than anyone could have expected in such a rapid amount of time. Brees’s 4,418 passing yards that season were at the time a career high, and his 11 interceptions marked a new career low for a full season.
2. Tom Brady, 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Age: 43
Season stat line: 4,633 passing yards, 40 touchdowns, 12 interceptions
Individual honors: none
Team success: The Bucs went 11-5 and finished second in the NFC South, but went on a wild run in the playoffs, culminating with a Super Bowl win over Kansas City.
This was the year the “Brady vs. Belichick” argument might have been settled for good, as Brady won a Super Bowl in his first year away from New England and Belichick went 7-9 without his star QB. It’s hard to argue with the end result that Brady delivered—the Bucs hadn’t won a playoff game since the 2002 season before the postseason GOAT arrived—but this wasn’t a vintage Brady campaign until the very end. His passing yardage total was better than it had been in his final years in New England, but he was a far more prolific passer in his second season with the Bucs than he was in his first. And the 2020 Bucs offense took a while to jell. Tampa Bay went 1-3 in a tough stretch of games against top competition in November before securing a wild-card spot with a 4-0 run the final month of the season. But his three-touchdown performance against the Chiefs in the Super Bowl was enough to cement his spot on this list.
3. Deion Sanders, 1994 San Francisco 49ers
Age: 27
Season stat line: six interceptions in 14 games, including three pick-sixes, and one recovered fumble. He added two more picks in the postseason.
Individual honors: Defensive Player of the Year, First team All-Pro, third in MVP voting
Team success: The 49ers went 13-3 (one loss came before Sanders signed) and beat the San Diego Chargers in the Super Bowl.
Sanders spent the first five years of his Hall of Fame career with the Atlanta Falcons, and when his contract was up, he embarked on a quest to sign a big contract with a Super Bowl contender. Ultimately, he turned down offers from the New Orleans Saints and the Miami Dolphins to sign with the 49ers, joining the team in Week 3. Sanders was America’s biggest two-sport star, playing in both the NFL and Major League Baseball (once even on the same day!), and he had recently been traded from the Atlanta Braves to the Cincinnati Reds. Because of the MLB strike that began in September, Sanders was able to devote his full attention to football and the 49ers, and he had the best single season of his career, returning three of his six interceptions for touchdowns, including two returns of at least 90 yards. He capped his lone season in San Francisco with an interception in the end zone in Super Bowl XXIX.
4. Saquon Barkley, 2024 Philadelphia Eagles
Age: 27
Season stat line: 2,005 rushing yards and 13 touchdowns in the regular season, with 442 rushing yards and five touchdowns so far this postseason.
Individual honors: First team All-Pro; finalist for MVP and Offensive Player of the Year (to be announced next week)
Team success: The Eagles improved from 11-6 to 14-3 in Barkley’s first season and won the NFC.
By now, you know how Barkley became an Eagle. You probably even watched his breakup with the New York Giants play out on Hard Knocks. And it didn’t take long for Barkley to prove that the Eagles had made the right decision in signing him to a three-year, $37.75 million contract, scoring three touchdowns (two rushing, one receiving) in the Eagles’ Week 1 win over the Packers in Brazil. He’s been just about unstoppable in every game since; he had 14 regular-season games with at least 100 rushing yards, and he went over 200 yards twice. He routinely broke games open with his explosive runs, and became the focal point of an Eagles offense that already had a pair of star receivers and a highly paid quarterback. If the Eagles manage to beat the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, it seems likely that Barkley will have been Philadelphia’s star and could claim the Super Bowl MVP award.
5. Peyton Manning, 2012 Denver Broncos
Age: 36
Season stat line: 4,659 passing yards, 37 touchdowns, 11 interceptions, and an NFL-best 68.6 completion percentage
Individual honors: Comeback Player of the Year, First team All-Pro, second place in MVP voting
Team success: The Broncos won their last 11 straight regular-season games to finish 13-3 and claimed the no. 1 seed in the AFC. They lost to the Ravens in overtime in the divisional round.
Manning jetted around the country on a free agent tour in March 2012 after being released by the Indianapolis Colts. He played catch with Jim Harbaugh, who was then the coach of the 49ers; considered a return to Tennessee (where he starred in college); took a meeting with the Dolphins as a favor to Dan Marino; and held a secret workout at Duke for John Elway and the Broncos, in hopes of showing that he was on track to return to the field after the spinal fusion surgery that forced him to miss the 2011 season. Manning ultimately said yes to the Broncos (who subsequently traded Tim Tebow to the New York Jets), and kicked off a culture change in Denver. It took a bit of time for the Broncos’ staff to blend Manning’s preferred style of offense with the language his new teammates already understood, and when he threw three interceptions in a Monday Night Football game in Week 2, there was real external concern about whether Manning’s second act would be a flop. But really, it was just getting started—even though his best individual season with the Broncos came a year later, when he won the MVP award and broke league records for passing yards and touchdowns.
6. Reggie White, 1993 Green Bay Packers
Age: 32
Season stat line: 13 sacks and three forced fumbles
Individual honors: Second team All-Pro and second in defensive player of the year voting
Team success: Green Bay finished 9-7 (the same as 1992) and won a wild-card game before losing in the divisional round.
Are we giving White a bump in this list because of what his free agency meant to the NFL? Yes. White would have been a Hall of Famer from his Eagles career alone, but he added six more stellar years in his 30s after joining the Packers. His first season in Green Bay had some spectacular highs, including a sack on his former Eagles teammate Randall Cunningham in Week 2, a three-sack game against John Elway and the Broncos, and two sacks in a win over Detroit in the first round of the playoffs.
7. Derrick Henry, 2024 Baltimore Ravens
Age: 30
Season stat line: 1,921 rushing yards, 16 rushing touchdowns (tied for first in the NFL)
Individual honors: Second team All-Pro
Team success: The Ravens won the AFC North but lost to the Bills in the divisional round of the playoffs.
Henry had a remarkable season at age 30, a point when running backs simply should not be able to handle 325 rushing attempts. But after eight years in Tennessee, he appeared fresh and rejuvenated in his first season in Baltimore, where he co-headlined the league’s best running game with Lamar Jackson. Still, there’s a bit of a “what if” here when it comes to Henry’s first season as a Raven, as he had just 16 carries (for 84 yards) in a two-point playoff loss to the Bills, a game in which Baltimore failed on two two-point conversion attempts, both incomplete passes.
8. Deion Sanders, 1995 Dallas Cowboys
Age: 28
Season stat line: two interceptions in nine regular-season games
Individual honors: none
Team success: Dallas won the Super Bowl.
For the second straight offseason, Sanders was a highly sought-after free agent, and when Jerry Jones made him an offer to become the league’s highest-paid defensive player, he picked the Cowboys. Sanders missed time in the first half of the season while recovering from a knee injury, but made his presence felt in all aspects of the game in the postseason, starting at corner (and intercepting a pass in the divisional round), while also serving in a limited role on offense as a gadget player (he had a 47-yard catch in the Super Bowl against Pittsburgh) and returning four punts.
9. Priest Holmes, 2001 Kansas City Chiefs
Age: 28
Season stat line: 1,555 rushing yards and 2,169 total scrimmage yards, both ranked first in the NFL that year.
Individual honors: First team All-Pro
Team success: The Chiefs went 6-10 that season and failed to make the playoffs.
Holmes is a unique player on this list because he wasn’t a star when he hit free agency. He had one good season with the Ravens, but was largely a role player during his four years in Baltimore, and when he signed with the Chiefs in 2001, he was making a base salary of just $448,000. But the Chiefs made him the focal point of their offense, and Holmes flourished in that role. He was the breakout star of the 2001 season and that kicked off one of the most impressive three-year stretches for a running back in league history.
10. Bryce Paup, 1995 Buffalo Bills
Age: 27
Season stat line: 17.5 sacks (best in the NFL), two interceptions
Individual honors: First team All-Pro, Defensive Player of the Year
Team success: The Bills went 10-6, won the AFC East, and won a wild-card game before losing in the divisional round.
Paup joined Buffalo in 1995 to essentially be a pass rush specialist, and benefitted from lining up on the opposite side of the defensive formation from future Hall of Famer Bruce Smith. Paup made the most of the situation in his first year in Buffalo, exploding for 17.5 sacks—a career high by 6.5 sacks—and that led to a Sports Illustrated article with the timely and punny headline “Paup Fiction.”
Honorable mentions: Simeon Rice, 2001 Tampa Bay Bucs; Shannon Sharpe, 2000 Baltimore Ravens; Curtis Martin, 1998 New York Jets; Tyrann Mathieu, 2019 Kansas City Chiefs; DeMarcus Ware, 2014 Denver Broncos
