SAQUON BARKLEY CHASES NFL HISTORY AS ALLEN EXCELS AND MAKES SNOW ANGELS
In a gripping MVP race, I pick A RUNNING BACK, whose reverse hurdle keeps him on pace for the all-time record while Allen scores three different ways, does blizzard tricks and is engaged to an actress
For the first time since O.J. Simpson motored up the 405 — OK, for the first time since Barry Sanders faced Emmitt Smith — I am interested in running backs. They are the slugs who line up near mascots and horn players and somewhere behind quarterbacks, the preferred fellowship of sports. Their deals veer toward $450 million for Patrick Mahomes and settle at a guaranteed $230 million for a sexual harasser.
This season, stunningly, the question is whether a back named Saquon Barkley is more worthy than the perceived Most Valuable Player. Josh Allen played on a white field in a Buffalo snowstorm Sunday night and buried the 49ers, including one play in which he scored a receiving touchdown after he threw a pass. Thank Amari Cooper, who pitched the ball back to Allen and allowed him to become the first quarterback ever to score as a passer, rusher and a receiver.
All in a week when Allen reported his engagement to actress Hailee Steinfield. NBC’s Cris Collinsworth put him on his fantasy team and enjoyed the double end-zone dip.
“I love that. So did I,” Allen said. “I wish (Cooper) got credited for something there, an assist or a passing touchdown. I just kind of chased the ball to be there and we made eye contact. … It was dope.”
“I was wondering what he was doing over there,” Cooper said. “I figured he was over there because he wanted the ball, so I gave it to him.”
More? Allen also created snow angels with his head coach, Sean McDermott. “He’s the one that got me to do it,” he said. “I’m not the biggest snow angel fan, because you get cold down there, my toes are freezing right now … but it was fun.”
Somehow, Barkley must overcome that blowtorch. He is bigger than Charles Barkley and continues to prove it, recalling how he occupied our Election Day brains with his acrobatic reverse hurdle. Earlier Sunday, he ran for a 25-yard touchdown that clinched Philadelphia’s victory in Baltimore. What he did was establish the revived Eagles as a legitimate Super Bowl contender. What he did was finish the high-level career of Joe Schoen, the general manager who didn’t want to pay him and ran him off the New York Giants with this comment: “We’re out.” What he did was outmaneuver Derrick Henry, another superb back, when he was bigger than Lamar Jackson or Jalen Hurts.
And what is the amount of Barkley’s contract?
A lowballed $37.75 million for three years.
This is a depressed marketplace beyond the country’s most influential labor unions. How preposterous are NFL executives to gut-bomb salaries at a position once dominated by the sport’s baddest men — Jim Brown, Walter Payton — as blow-out roster upheavals were demanded for Herschel Walker and Ricky Williams. As I write, it’s sad watching San Francisco’s Christian McCaffrey trying to run the ball in a blizzard and injure a ligament in his knee, which will end his season. He’s just a running back, so no one should care about his $36.3 million in guarantees going away.
I care.
Can the rushers call a wildcat strike for the playoffs? Amazing how the Eagles would crash without Barkley, the Ravens without Henry, the Bills without James Cook and the Green Bay Packers without Josh Jacobs. They’ve already gathered for a Zoom meeting and realized front offices are punishing them for years of heavy-carry production. In any other game, in any other walk of life, employees would be handsomely rewarded for toil. Not when you’re the gruesome workhorses carrying the football.
“F— analytics, bruh. I’m so tired of that s— … ‘but the analytics show this.’ Don’t put numbers on me,” Barkley said. “Don’t put numbers on Derrick Henry. Barry (Sanders) was in his thirties rocking out. Adrian Peterson was in his thirties rocking out. Emmitt was in his thirties rocking out.”
He is 27. Henry is 30. Don’t be surprised if you see them playing for a championship in February. “I love that he’s a 30-year-old running back, and he’s balling,” Barkley said. “I don’t pocket watch — ‘everybody get your money, get your paper.’ But there are a lot of people right now that are getting paid a lot more than Derrick Henry. What are we really talking about?”
We’re talking about discriminatory cost-cutting. Quarterbacks, receivers and edge rushers make the cash flow when running backs aren’t far above long snappers. Shame on franchises for overpaying quarterbacks because they are paying for the position, not for a particular player. You don’t think Barkley is worth more this year than Hurts, who signed for $255 million? In a dozen games, your irrelevant ball-lugger has 1,499 rushing yards and a 6.1-yard average. He remains on pace to break the league’s single-season record of 2,105 yards, though Eric Dickerson did it in 16 games in 1984. A week earlier, Barkley rushed for 255 yards and 302 yards from scrimmage in Los Angeles, near the freeway where O.J. once ran from life.
“You're already the best running back in the world. I think you’re the best player in the world,” teammate A.J. Brown told him.
“I think everybody knows what kind of player he is,” Eagles tackle Lane Johnson said. “He’s having a year where people can see what type of talent he carries. A guy with his size who can do that, it’s fun blocking for him.”
“First of all, Saquon, slow your ass down,” Henry said. “Damn. He’s a hell of a player.”
When quarterbacks are secured for multiple seasons, running backs are churned out and sign elsewhere. General managers might notice the end of Schoen — whose words were uttered on HBO’s “Hard Knocks” — and wonder if they are next with a bad decision. The Giants kept quarterback Daniel Jones at $160 million, one of the worst contracts in NFL history. He departed for Minnesota last week as a backup to Sam Darnold.
“You look at offensively what they've been able to do, the system, coach (Kevin) O'Connell and his staff. Just a lot of good things happening across the board as a team and organization, and on offense especially,” Jones said. “Just excited to join that and help out where I can.”
Barkley didn’t gloat. “Sucks to see how everything went down for him over there,” he said of Jones. “I’ve got nothing but great things to say about him. You're not really gonna find anyone who is going to say negative things about him. He’s a guy who is going to come in and work.”
The issue is how 50 sportswriters will vote for the MVP award. They cast entries at the end of the regular season, which means Allen is the traditional choice and Barkley needs to pass him with the all-time record. Since 2007, the winners have been Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers, Mahomes, Jackson, Matt Ryan and Cam Newton. The one exception was a rusher, Adrian Peterson, in 2012. Remember the years when LaDainian Tomlinson, Shaun Alexander, Marshall Faulk, Terrell Davis, Sanders, Smith and Thurman Thomas won? It wasn’t that long ago.
Let’s reunify the system. “I’m thankful to be here and thankful for the fresh start,” Barkley said. “A big reason why I wanted to come here is I think this is a spot where I can rewrite my story. I feel like I can show everyone the type of player I can be and was meant to be.”
He tries not to look at the scoreboard on a sizzling day. “I literally said, ‘Man, I wish I never saw that.’ That’s just the devil talking,” he said at SoFi Stadium. “I just kept my head down, kept trusting the system, and I popped a long one.”
And the MVP? “We’ll start thinking about that when the season’s over,” he said. “I love being in that conversation. It’s cool and all.”
The chagrin surfaces when executives in their offices, as we saw Schoen on TV, make awful calls while a nervous owner watches. “I’ll have a tough time sleeping if Saquon goes to Philadelphia, I’ll tell you that,” John Mara said. “As I’ve told you, I’ve been around enough players, but he’s the most popular player we have, by far.” Now he’s the most popular player down the road.
Josh Allen is a popular man. Of his marriage proposal to Steinfeld, he said, “Felt good. Felt free.” We’ve seen quarterbacks who can’t stay together with their mates, but this one seems right. He also feels free on the field without receiver Stefon Diggs, whose moodiness grew old before he was shipped to Houston. In Week 3, Allen said, “That's the beauty of it when guys get to buy into this and really understand like I may not get the ball four or five times thrown to me a game but the one or two times I do, I'm going to have opportunities to be in the end zone. It's a fun and wonderful thing when you got a bunch of guys that don't care about stats, they don't care about the touchdowns.”
He said he wasn’t “trying to tear down anybody.” But the point was made. Allen never has been better, at a time when Barkley never has been better. He was having fun with analysis that suggested his Henry matchup was a heavyweight fight.
“It ain’t basketball. It ain’t like I go out there and tackle Derrick Henry,” he said. “To be honest, I don’t know if I really want to tackle Derrick Henry.”
Don’t worry about it. The rest of the league can’t tackle Saquon, whose name means he is sacred and blessed. Allen is sacred and blessed, too, and we wish him well with snow angels and Hailee. He finishes second on my MVP ballot.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.