Tom Rock: Giants missing Saquon Barkley no longer a storyline; funny how winning changes things
Eagles' Saquon Barkley looks on during warmups prior to a game against the Commanders on Nov. 1, 2026 in Landover, MD. Credit: Getty Images/Patrick Smith
Winning a Super Bowl in his first season in Philadelphia after an ugly and very public divorce from the Giants certainly gave Saquon Barkley the opportunity to laugh first.
For most of his tenure with the Eagles, he’s been about the only party involved in that scenario who deserved a chuckle. His teams won back-to-back division titles during a stretch in which the Giants were barely able to win back-to-back games (they finally did so without him in the last two fairly meaningless contests of last season).
But as the Giants prepare to face Barkley and the Eagles on Sunday for the first time this year in this third season apart, something very interesting has happened. There isn’t a whole lot of talk about what the Giants let walk through their door and head down the Jersey Turnpike. Nor is there chatter regarding how much better he made the Eagles and how much worse he left the Giants.
It’s the Giants who are riding high these days, in first place with a chance to essentially seal up the NFC East by beating the Eagles and Commanders inside this next week. And it’s Barkley and the Eagles who are floundering about, losers of six straight and trying to maintain some competitive dignity with a quarterback making his first start in the league.
Who’s losing sleep now?
The Giants are playing so well right now that the long list of their former players who went elsewhere to find success is barely on anyone’s mind these days.
It wasn’t long ago that fans in particular would look out at the NFL landscape and see not just Barkley tearing it up (they didn’t have to look too far for that) but Xavier McKinney playing great ball for Green Bay and Julian Love and Leonard Williams becoming key components in Seattle’s Super Bowl run.
If the Giants were struggling this year, we would be harping so much more on the potential Defensive Player of the Year season Dexter Lawrence is putting forth in Cincinnati after his Escape from New York.
None of that is happening, though. The greener grass is no longer elsewhere. It’s right here at MetLife Stadium.
Safety Jason Pinnock — another player who left the Giants to find playoff success last year with the 49ers but returned this season — told Newsday he notices that phenomenon whenever he speaks with his Giants fan friends back home in Connecticut. In the past they’d constantly point out to him how well former Giants were doing elsewhere. That no longer is the case.
“When you are losing and things are going bad, you look around for other people having successes,” Pinnock said. “When you are winning, it eliminates a lot of that. The conclusion at the end of the day is that if you are winning, everything is good.”
The Giants are. And it is.
Keeping it that way is the next chore on the to-do list.
It took what felt like a very long time for the Giants to move out of the shadow that Barkley's departure left on the organization, but it’s really been only two seasons. An eventful two seasons, but only two seasons. And it’s been such a turnover for the Giants that there are only six players on the current active roster who were on the team when Barkley last played with them: Andrew Thomas, Kayvon Thibodeaux, John Michael Schmitz, Deonte Banks, Micah McFadden and Pinnock.
The coaches? They’re all long gone.
“I don't really know him,” John Harbaugh said of Barkley this week. “I maybe bumped into him somewhere along the way, a Pro Bowl or something like that, and chatted with him. First-class guy from everything I've been told or seen. Obviously, a great player. That's what I know.”
Once the heart and soul of the Giants? The player who led them to their only playoff appearance in the past nine years and their only postseason win in the past 14? That barely registers any longer.
The players never begrudged Barkley his money and success, even when he was winning a Super Bowl while they watched from afar. Very afar.
“Fans may look at it that way, we don’t,” Thomas said. “He moved on and did what was best for himself and his family.”
Added Thibodeaux: “It was great for him and his legacy to win that Super Bowl. You do nothing but wish him the best.”
Barkley insists that there are no hard feelings.
“I have no hate in my heart for the New York Football Giants,” he said on a podcast with Front Office Sports this week. “It didn’t work out.”
Fans, though, see it differently. They saw the Giants bumble their way through negotiations with the ultra-popular player (thanks to “Hard Knocks” and Barkley’s own documentary on the process) and they treated Barkley as a traitor for sighing with the hated Eagles. Many probably still do.
Sunday feels as if it could punctuate that narrative.
None of this is to say that the Giants were right for not finding a way to keep Barkley at the time of the protracted contract negotiations with him. It was just a few weeks ago that Harbaugh spoke about the Giants’ current depth chart and bemoaned the fact that the team doesn’t have “a Derrick Henry or a Saquon Barkley.”
Don’t think that didn’t get the attention of general manager Joe Schoen, who let Barkley walk.
It’s clear that Harbaugh has continued to try hard to add someone like Barkley before next week’s trade deadline, too.
In the business, we call that irony. Getting rid of Barkley led to so much failure around here that they had to hire Harbaugh to clean it up, which might be the great long-term positive to come from the scenario. But now Harbaugh needs someone like Barkley to help him do the job for which he was hired.
It’s “The Gift of the Magi,” NFL style.
Maybe Barkley will make his way back to the Giants someday. If it happened for Odell Beckham Jr. (albeit briefly). It certainly could happen for him.
Until then, there really is only one way for the Giants and their fans to truly move past the loss of Barkley and what it did to this franchise. One way to get the next and possibly last laugh in the saga.
They have to do what Barkley did after he left.
They have to win.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
