Deal or no deal? Saquon Barkley and Giants must decide by Monday
Saquon Barkley of the New York Giants celebrates his second quarter touchdown against the Washington Commanders at MetLife Stadium on Dec. 4, 2022. Credit: Jim McIsaac
The clock is ticking.
For real this time.
The stalemate between Saquon Barkley and the Giants has reached its apex.
Today is the day.
All of this, of course, once was avoidable. And now it’s not.
If there is no agreement on a new deal between Barkley and the Giants by 4 p.m., the jig will be up.
Time waits for no one.
Any tagged player who declines to sign a multiyear deal by that deadline will be required to play the 2023 season under the one-year franchise tag or sit out.
It seems impossible to imagine Barkley sitting out games.
But it’s come to this.
Sitting out cannot possibly be the answer. Not for Barkley, who would lose a season (or part of one) in his prime. Not the Giants, who would lose their best playmaker, a four-time team captain and a locker-room leader and spokesman — along with at least some of the momentum that has been generated by coach Brian Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen retooling the roster in their vision.
The franchise tender for running backs would pay Barkley $10.1 million for the season, provided he plays.
And therein lies part of the problem, of course.
At his youth football camp in June, Barkley did not commit to playing if he doesn’t have a contract. “I think that’s a conversation,” he said then. “When that date comes up, then I’ll have to sit down with my team, sit down with my family and make decisions.”
Barkley probably is correct when he said the running back market was artificially lowered by the top three free agents at the position — Barkley, Las Vegas’ Josh Jacobs and Dallas’ Tony Pollard — all getting tagged. With that trio setting the ceiling at $10.1 million, running backs at the next tier were slotted even lower.
Miles Sanders’ four-year, $25.4 million contract with Carolina was the most lucrative running back deal signed this offseason. Barkley is more valuable to the Giants than that, but the running back market has cratered.
Barkley has seen teammates Daniel Jones (four years and $160M) and Dexter Lawrence (four years, $90M) cash in with the Giants this offseason, while he has not.
The leaguewide devaluing of the running back position is partly to blame. Consider: Sanders’ contract includes a $5.9 million signing bonus and $13 million guaranteed. His average salary: $6,350,000.
And Sanders was coming off a 1,269-yard season, which made him a top-five rusher in the league behind Jacobs, Derrick Henry, Nick Chubb and Barkley.
In a recent interview with the Rich Eisen Show, Sanders discussed what he sees as the “disrespect” of the running back.
“It’s nothing that we’re doing wrong,” said Sanders, who was a teammate of Barkley's at Penn State. “We’re doing everything that we have to do as far as on the field and stuff like that. For people and GMs or owners to think that running backs are not as valued as much is a lie because you’ve got to see how everything plays out. You’ve got to see what guys like Christian McCaffrey, the stuff he does, things that Saquon Barkley [does], the things that Josh Jacobs [does] consistently each year.”
Sanders believes there is an unfair perception of his position.
“You want to use the franchise tag and create a certain market for running backs because you think they last only three or four years. I think every running back in the league is underpaid right now. It [stinks] to be a running back right now.”
Heading into the 2023 season, Barkley is still the guy on the Giants’ offense, the one every opponent can’t let beat them. And now he has a teammate in tight end Darren Waller who poses another set of problems for opposing defenses.
The possibilities? Maybe not endless. But they are enticing.
Unless, somehow, the Giants and Barkley believe they will be better apart than together this season. That’s not only hard to believe, but it’s next to impossible to come up with an argument that would support that hypothesis.
As Monday dawns, there is still time.
This can be true in any business, in any walk of life, in any number of circumstances: Deadlines have a way of spurring movement.
But for Barkley and the Giants, the clock is ticking.
Kimberly Jones covers the Giants for Newsday, a beat she first worked in the early 2000s before joining the YES Network to cover the Yankees. She worked for the NFL Network for more than a decade and has been heard semi-regularly on WFAN.
