Saquon Barkley’s goal of breaking Tiki Barber’s Giants rushing record sends intriguing message for future
Once the NFL trade deadline passed this week, Saquon Barkley was talking like a player who can clearly see a path to being Once a Giant, Only a Giant for his entire NFL career.
“A cool moment for me, right now I think I’m fifth all-time rushing in this franchise,” Barkley, 26, said Thursday at his locker. “I plan to try to find a way to figure out how to be one. That’s a goal of mine. I know Tiki [Barber] is No. 1.”
There would be only one way for Barkley to catch Barber’s 10,449 career Giants rushing yards from his 4,661 total through five-and-a-half years: to play in New York for his entire career, and to play at a high level for at least five or six more seasons to make up that 5,788-yard gap.
But Barkley appeared to understand exactly what he was saying. He believes it could happen.
Back in March, John Mara sold Barkley on the co-owner’s “dream” that his running back “would play his whole career as a Giant like Eli [Manning] did, like [Michael] Strahan did, like Tiki [Barber] did.
“And I mentioned to him, ‘Look what they’re doing off the field now,’” Mara said. “And I think he would like that, as well.”
Barkley seems to have fully embraced that vision, now that he’s clear of this summer’s ugly contract spat and a trade deadline that marked a key juncture in his tenure with the team.
“I’ve never changed my opinion of me not wanting to be a Giant for life,” Barkley said Thursday. “After everything that happened during the offseason, and realizing and growing up and seeing the business side of it, [you’re] knowing that it’s rare for one player to be on a team for a long time.
“Obviously you have a lot of Giants, a lot of greats, like the Elis, the Strahans and the Tikis,” he added. “That’s something I would love to be part of, and I’ve been vocal about that. I know Mr. Mara came out and said that. But the stuff, it’s a business, take it year by year, day by day, and the stuff that I can control and the things I can’t control, attack it full force.”
This is most interesting because Barkley is only on a one-year, franchise tag contract. And the Giants have the ability to tag him a second consecutive time in the spring, which would pay him nicely in 2024 but wouldn’t provide any long-term security in the Big Apple.
Could a multi-year extension be back on the table for Barkley, either imminently or after the season, to further secure him as a key piece of both their brand and their on-field team?
Mara, Steve Tisch and Joe Schoen sent a clear message by not trading Barkley at the deadline that they recognize he is still the face of their franchise. It contrasted sharply with the team removing Barkley from all their spring promotional material when they were at odds.
This feels like a recommitment to Barkley as a central piece of what this team will be, and not just what it is. But Barkley said “I don’t see it that way.”
“If you’re going off what happened in the offseason with me getting tagged and me not getting the deal done, I never questioned how they view me as a player or what’s my value as a player,” he said. “I just think it’s business and they had all the leverage, and there really wasn’t much I could do.
“If I was able to hit the free agent market, I think they would’ve handled things a little bit different[ly], but that’s not the case,” he continued. “It’s not them saying they’re not going to trade me and now they’re being recommitted to me. I know how much I mean to my teammates, and my teammates are really vocal about that to me. So that doesn’t really bother me at all.
He added: “To say, ‘Oh, they’re recommitted,’ I don’t focus on that at all. I just know that it’s the NFL. There’s really nothing I can do about it.”
That’s the qualifier to everything Barkley is saying: he understands the business part of it better now, and he can’t project what that will mean for his long-term future as a Giant.
All he can focus on is trying to lead this season’s struggling Giants team back to respectability and on the track to progress in 2024.
“[We are] ready to go,” Barkley said. “We feel like we should be 4-4 right now. Obviously, we’re not. We’re 2-6. The games didn’t go our way, but there’s a couple plays here and there where if we could change, it’d be completely different, and it would be a whole different mindset for the outside world view of where the Giants are at and how we can compete.
“So our mindset and our focus is one game at a time, and that’s going to Vegas against a really good team with a new coach,” he added. “They’re going to have a whole new spark. It’s going to be a tough challenge. We’ve got to come out with a win.”
