Midway through the fourth quarter of the Philadelphia Eagles’ 55-23 NFC championship game win over the Washington Commanders, the Fox broadcast aired a brief highlight reel of running back Saquon Barkley: twirling down the field, striding up the sidelines, sticking it, as ever, to an NFC East opponent. “Saquon Barkley has been magnificent,” play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt said about the 27-year-old Eagle, who signed a three-year, $37.75 million contract with Philly in March and then proceeded to rack up over 2,000 rushing yards in his first year with his new team.
Barkley had just gotten into the end zone again, his third touchdown of the afternoon (his very first touch of the game turned into a 60-yard score) and fifth of the playoffs. Lincoln Financial Field echoed with M! V! P! chants in his honor. The Eagles, fueled by hooly wooder and loyal dive bars and Go Birds! going global, were well on their way to a third Super Bowl berth in the past eight seasons. And up in the broadcast booth—which that day featured one lifelong Eagles fan and one former Patriots quarterback—the fellas simply could not resist getting in a few quick jabs at everyone’s shared punching bag. That would be the New York Giants, who drafted Barkley second overall in 2018, yet never quite figured out what to do with him—and are now stuck watching him soar with a rival franchise that most definitely did.
“Giants fans may have a tough time sleeping going forward,” said Burkhardt—a droll reference to a now-infamous comment from Giants owner John Mara that aired on Hard Knocks: Offseason last summer. (“I’m going to have a tough time sleeping if Saquon goes to Philadelphia,” were Mara’s unfortunate exact words, a harrowing portrait of a franchise in free fall.) “Giant mistake letting him go,” Fox color commentator Tom Brady responded, all too happy to be piling on.
Such hardy-har-har remarks were nothing new. A growing canon began emerging last summer, when Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni said that he’d figured out a foolproof new strategy for engaging with Giants fans who recognized him in the wild: saying “We got your best player!” and watching their faces fall.
And since then? Call it Saquon’s Law: For each of Barkley’s actions that lift up the Eagles, there’s some equal and opposite reaction that disparages the Giants. When Barkley scored two touchdowns in November against Washington, Dallas Cowboys loudmouth Micah Parsons tweeted: “All jokes aside they giants almost made us believe saquon wasn’t HIM anymore!!” When Barkley scored two more touchdowns the following game, this time against the Rams, Jim Rome incanted: “Nighty night, John Mara.” Even Barkley himself has gotten in on the fun, appearing in a commercial for the sleep aid Unisom that—yep, you get it, included a John Mara joke.
On Monday night, at the Super Bowl’s media kickoff event, Barkley told reporters that this time last year, give or take a month, he was putting together a good old-fashioned pros-and-cons list about the prospect of joining the Eagles. There was, Barkley said, just a single item in the negative column. “The only con about Philly was I might get some slack because I played in New York,” he said. As it turns out, he needn’t have worried. It’s proved much easier for people to cut out the middleman and needle the New York Giants directly.
In his six seasons with the Giants, Barkley reached the postseason only once. Now, he’s days away from playing in the Super Bowl in his very first season in Philly. The Eagles are facing the Kansas City Chiefs in a championship rematch from two seasons ago, and it’ll be a doozy: with one team out for revenge and the other seeking the NFL’s first three-peat. Super Bowl Sunday is Barkley’s birthday; he’ll turn 28. And a few days ago, he announced his engagement to Anna Congdon, whom he met at Penn State and with whom he has two children. It is, finally, all happening for Saquon Barkley—and all it took was him leaving New York behind.
Last March, about two weeks after Barkley joined the Eagles, he was a guest on the New Heights With Jason & Travis Kelce podcast. The move was still so fresh that even Barkley didn’t seem to have totally internalized it. When Jason Kelce asked which 30 seconds of NFL footage Barkley would suggest they include on their podcast’s YouTube feed to best showcase his essence as a player, Barkley began: “It’ll be against you guys …” before remembering that the Eagles were no longer you guys. “Or, ‘us’ now,” he corrected himself. “I gotta get used to this ‘us’ now!”
Barkley adjusted pretty quickly after that. The running back’s impacts on both his new team and his old one have been apparent from the teams’ opening kickoffs in September, and the two franchises’ fortunes read like a Goofus and Gallant calendar:
In September, Barkley scored three touchdowns in his Eagles debut …
… the day after the Big Blue managed only six points total in their season opener.
In November, as Barkley was backward-hurdling fools …
… the Giants were themselves fools, hurtling backward, smack dab in the middle of a 10-game losing streak.
In a January snowglobe playoff game, Barkley ran for 62- and 78-yard scores as the Eagles beat the Rams …
… meanwhile the Giants—ugh, god, who even cares what the Giants were up to? By then, their season had been over for weeks.
There was also the first time the two teams faced one another, in Week 7, a game that showcased the full spectrum of the Saquon Barkley Experience. A New York–Philly matchup is always hectic in one way or another, but this one really had a lot going on. On the bus ride to his old field, MetLife Stadium, Barkley gazed out the window and saw some Giants fans torching his jersey in a parking lot. (“Hopefully I never experience anything like that again,” Barkley said.) He got a little revenge in the game's second quarter, ripping off a 55-yard run. And in the third quarter, he got even more, racking up carries of 38 and 41 yards that each set up touchdowns.
By the start of the fourth, MetLife Stadium was quiet, the Eagles had an 18-point lead, and Barkley had 176 rushing yards on 17 carries—putting him just 14 yards short of setting a new personal single-game best. But when Sirianni told Barkley about his statistics, the running back opted to stay on the sideline so that lesser-used guys like Kenneth Gainwell and Will Shipley could see some action. Even in the midst of humiliating his opponent, Barkley easily toggled back to humble mode.
“He looked at me,” Sirianni told reporters after the game, “and said—and this gives me chills to think about—he looked at me and said, ‘Let the other guys eat.’ I was like ‘You’re special, dude.’” Video of their conversation was posted by the Eagles, though Barkley seemed embarrassed by the attention. He told the Pivot podcast: “I kind of wish [it] never went viral or kind of made it out there,” because “I feel like it takes away from being authentic.” (Barkley also made sure he wasn’t throwing anyone under the bus, adding, “Obviously, you know, shout-out to the Eagles PR team. I knew I was mic’d up.”)
Healthy attitude, check! “Legs that look like they chafe”—as Julian Edelman described ’em on the NFL Network on Monday night, adding “that’s when you know you have a great running back”—check! Throw in an Eagles franchise that “took into account the way [Barkley] made them feel as an opponent” in their analysis of his value, and it all adds up to this: In the 2024 regular season, Barkley rushed for more yards than the majority of NFL teams. And in three playoff games this winter, he’s added another 442 yards on the ground. Throughout NFL history, only Terrell Davis has finished with more combined rushing yardage in a season—back in 1998, when he and his Denver Broncos won the Super Bowl. Barkley needs 30 yards in the Super Bowl to take over the record. But his real goal is both bigger and smaller: just one (1) more win.
Barkley likes to tell the story of his young daughter’s reaction when he told her he was going to Philly: “Does that mean we’re gonna win now?” she asked. And he told her: “Hopefully.” It’s worth noting that Barkley has something of a personal history with this kind of move. His relocation to the Eagles wasn’t the first time that Barkley pivoted away from the New York–Northern New Jersey metropolitan region and toward the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And it wasn’t the second time, either!
Barkley was born in the South Bronx—his former-boxer father, who flaunts a good-sized Jets tattoo on his forearm, absolutely worshipped Curtis Martin—but Barkley was still a wee lad of 4 when his family relocated to the Lehigh Valley for good. And for his own good: According to a December 2016 profile of Barkley in regional news outlet The Morning Call, one big upside of that move was that “Saquon’s asthma symptoms relented.” Simply put, “He breathed better in Bethlehem.”
That same Morning Call profile, which was published during Barkley’s sophomore season in college, described the then-19-year-old running back as “the conduit through which Penn State’s offense operated, and the central figure for every opposing defensive coordinator to trace.” It also quoted a much-older alum who had attended the same high school as Barkley: Matt Millen. “He’s smart, humble, coachable, teachable; there’s nothing in there that’s negative,” was how Millen assessed the youngster. “And he’s a 220-pound guy who runs a sub 4.4.” (By the following summer, Barkley was also a guy who could power-clean 405 pounds, a feat that set a new Penn State weight room record.)
Most of the details in that previous paragraph would have left even Barkley shocked just a few years earlier, because the college program that he first committed to, in September 2013, wasn’t Penn State—nor was it even in Pennsylvania. It was Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. And hand-to-God, Barkley was stoked about that decision. “I spent eight years at Rutgers working in recruiting,” one former team staffer later recalled in an interview with NJ.com, “and I don’t remember seeing any kid more grateful to receive a Rutgers offer.”
In that New Heights podcast appearance last spring, Barkley explained why that was. “Rutgers offered me my sophomore year, off of my JV film,” he told the Kelces, sounding as astonished as they were. “I wasn’t a big recruit. I got my stars later on, but at the time, I was 16, 15; a hundred and … fifty-five …? pounds.” Rutgers showing interest in Barkley was what encouraged him to get serious about himself. “After my sophomore year, that’s when I was like—I started getting that mentality, and I started getting into the weight room, and started grinding and pushing myself,” he said. “Rutgers offered me straight off of, like, potential that I’d never even seen in myself.”
Unfortunately for Rutgers, its speedy little secret got out only a few months later. Penn State head coach James Franklin was hired in January 2014, and one of the very first things he did after securing the job was aggressively pursue Barkley as part of his “Dominate the State” recruiting initiative. Franklin “told me that I’m coming to Penn State, that he’s not taking no for an answer,” Barkley told The Morning Call in 2015. “He said that I’m staying in Pennsylvania, playing for my home state, and that I’m going to help Penn State take over college football.”
If you swap out “take over college football” for “have fun, play hard, and generate hella highlights,” that’s exactly what Barkley went on to do. As a true freshman at Penn State in 2015, he started six games, scored eight touchdowns—two of them against poor dear Rutgers, whom Barkley decommitted from in “one of the hardest things” he said he ever had to do—and was named second-team All–Big Ten. As a sophomore and junior, he left everything in the dust, recording 22 and 21 touchdowns, earning back-to-back Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year honors, losing an oh-so-close Rose Bowl and winning a Fiesta Bowl, and doing this:
Forgoing his senior year in Happy Valley, Barkley entered the NFL draft in 2018. He was snagged by the New York Giants, with the second pick. And for a time, Barkley was back, back in the New York groove—or, more accurately, back in some greater-New-York-ish-adjacent groove. MetLife Stadium lies about a quarter of the way between where Barkley was born and where he would-have-but-never-did suit up for Scarlet Knights football. But from Saquon’s vantage point these days, all of those spots have converged, into the space behind him.
Throughout his career, Barkley has appeared to get along with just about everyone he encounters—except for Tiki Barber, the former Giants running back and current WFAN host. (Green flag!) Barber has a long history of stirring up trouble with a smile. And last March, when Barkley left New York, Barber declared him “dead to me” (with a smile). Recently, though—perhaps after hearing Tom Brady snark “giant mistake” during the NFC championship game—Barber adopted a different, weirder stance. When his WFAN cohost asked him in late January to take bets on how many jokes or jabs there might be about the Giants during the Super Bowl broadcast—which Burkhardt and Brady will be calling on Fox—Barber didn’t so much issue a prediction as a prescription. “None,” he said. “I think it’s been played out, and if they are anything other than tone-deaf, they will get it.”
While I’m not entirely sure why Barber was so strident in his answer—tone-deaf to what? New Yorkers’ feelings?—I do get something. No one likes being reminded about the one that got away, especially if that one was also a high pick. For Giants fans, the subject of Saquon being better off somewhere else feels played out because it’s been playing out for so long: way before Barkley became an Eagle, and really even before he was a Giant.
To understand how the New York Football Giants fumbled the bag so hard with a rare gem like Barkley, it helps to consider what was concrete within the franchise in the late-2010s. That’s right, I’m talking about Eli Manning. Say what you will about the big lug: He was so load-bearing for the Giants, and for so long, that of course everything crumbled as he started to deteriorate.
By 2018, Manning was no longer the player who’d won two Super Bowl MVPs (I know there are people out there grumbling that he never was that player, and I hear you and see you), but that didn’t really matter: The mediocrity was the point. To team executives, Manning was a known quantity, a steady state: good enough to help develop Odell Beckham Jr. and to shoulder a transition from head coach Tom Coughlin to Ben McAdoo, but also reliable enough to plod ever onward without Beckham when the receiver missed most of 2017. It was that lost season that landed the 3-13 Giants the second overall draft pick they’d use to select Barkley. But in some ways, it was the season before that which functionally brought Barkley to New York.
In 2016, Manning had looked like a kid out there on the field, throwing for more than 4,000 yards and leading the Giants to an 11-5 record. Beckham had triple-digit receptions. The team made the playoffs. And the resulting hopium was so powerful and long-lasting that a few months before Barkley was drafted in 2018, Manning and a reconvalesced Beckham were spoofing Dirty Dancing for a Super Bowl commercial that I watched, conservatively, a thousand times. So rather than heeding the advice of Bill Barnwell that draft and, say, using their first-round pick to retool at quarterback (in the class that gave us Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, and Sam Darnold) or fill a deep need at tackle, general manager Dave Gettleman decided to shoot for the moon—a.k.a. the best player available in the draft.
In the years that followed, even after New York finally did decide it was time to move on to a new quarterback, drafting Daniel Jones with the sixth pick in 2019, the franchise made new versions of its old mistakes. Swept up in the heady fun of one solid 2022 season that included a playoff upset over the Vikings, the Giants decided to double down on Jones, inking him to a four-year, $160 million contract in 2023. Spooked by Barkley’s past injuries and the prevailing schools of thought about the value and longevity of his position, they put the franchise tag on their franchise running back, kicking the can down the road until they eventually lowballed him enough to drive him out of town as the HBO cameras rolled.
Forged as it was in this micro-boom/bust cauldron of dead-cat bounces and false peaks, Barkley’s time in New York always felt polarizing, though not in the typical ways. I often found discussions about him with other Giants fans to be distinguished not by disagreement but by an unusual level of shared consensus—the consensus of having both of these thoughts at the same time: OMG, I love this guy so much!! and also, UGH, the Giants never should have drafted him.
“Our hands are full here with Saquon,” said Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo last Friday. “There is nothing he can’t do.” Philadelphia’s offense has passing-game threats like Jalen Hurts, A.J. Brown, and DeVonta Smith—but it’s Barkley in the backfield who is, as they say, a problem. “The toughest challenge we’ve had in the run game this year,” according to Spags.
Barkley, for his part, pointed out on Monday that he’d been set up for success this season by his stellar offensive line: “It’s a bit easier this year when you have those big guys blocking up front,” he said.
Not everything with the Philadelphia Eagles has been quite so lovey-dovey in recent seasons, though. There’s plenty of revelry in Philadelphia, but there are also hairline cracks in all the crystal, and it could shatter under the right pressure. Some of the most delicate work in sports involves handling abundance.
The public tension between Hurts and Sirianni that developed last season has gone mostly by the wayside this year, but it still feels one losing streak away from bubbling back up. (Or, honestly, even one winning streak: Back in December, a different rift, between Hurts and Brown, deepened when Brown answered “passing” to a question about what the team could improve upon. At the time, Philly had just posted its ninth straight victory.) This year’s 14-3 record—and Barkley’s sunny presence—has surely smoothed out some issues, but you can’t eliminate ’em all. One (champagne) problem that comes to mind—the finite number of targets to go around. Divide those up among all the offensive stars on the team, and that becomes an equation that Barkley is as likely to complicate as to solve.
At the helm of all of this is Sirianni, whose season has included butting heads with Eagles fans, Eagles coaches, and former Eagles—as well as headlines like “Nick Sirianni criticized for using kids as ‘shield’ at postgame press conference.” Speaking to the media earlier this week, Sirianni told reporters: “I’m emotional, as you guys know.” Ya think?
Did I thoroughly enjoy Sirianni’s sanguine response to Katie Porter Brown breaking out his copy of The You You Are: Touchdown Edition on the bench during Philly’s wild-card game? How could I not? The Eagles coach was one part Joe Mazzulla–on-meditation, one part my A.J. Brown Is Not Disgruntled shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. But did I also definitely mentally file it all away to reference whenever this all comes crashing down, one way or another? Also yes.
In an interview with Erin Andrews this week, Barkley remarked that the magnitude of everything that has happened to and because of him this season “doesn’t feel real.” But while it certainly is real, that also doesn’t mean it’s forever. So many calls and bounces have to break the right way, so many souls and bones have to resist getting broken, to be one of those players and teams that are still active in February. Listening back to Barkley’s podcast with the Kelces from last March, it was both sad and sweet to hear him talk about the highlight of his career to that point: making it to a divisional playoff game against the Eagles after the 2022 season. Sad because that probably really was the high point of Barkley’s career in New York, and he/I deserved better; sweet because holy moly, the guy really has no idea how much of the best is yet to come.
On media night, one of the guys standing near Barkley’s podium with a microphone was NFL quarterback Jameis Winston, who was moonlighting as a correspondent for Fox Sports. “I ain’t got no job,” Winston yelled. “Who should sign me in free agency?”
Barkley smiled. “Ah, I think New York needs a quarterback right now,” he answered, and as the New York Giants got roasted, again, all I could do was laugh.
