Saquon Barkley took the ball up the middle and to the house Wednesday before his head coach, Brian Daboll, motioned with his hand how he wanted his running back to tweak his route through the secondary. They slapped hands in agreement, and Barkley jogged off to continue what was a spirited Giants practice, right up until Collin Johnson’s injury wrecked the mood.
Not even two hours after Sterling Shepard returned from the Achilles tear he suffered last December, another Giants wide receiver went down with the same injury. Pro football is a hazardous short-term business, and nobody knows that better than Barkley, who went out of his way to leave the sideline and head downfield to congratulate Shepard on a catch he made during his first day back at the office.
Healthy at last after the knee and ankle injuries shut down his E-ZPass lane to superstardom, Barkley is equal parts happy and angry. Happy, a source close to him told The Post, because the running back strongly prefers Daboll’s player-friendly management style and offensive system to former coach Joe Judge’s.
Angry, Barkley said in an interview, because the doubters and haters have written him off as a failed franchise player, inspiring him to say, “F–k everybody. I’m ready to go crazy.”
The truth is, every Giants teammate, coach, scout, executive and fan is ready for Saquon Barkley to go crazy too, and to become the juggernaut he was drafted to be with the second-overall pick in 2018. Everyone who cares about this team is ready for the 6-foot, 232-pound back to become the player he strongly suggested he’d be when he racked up more than 2,000 yards from scrimmage and scored 15 touchdowns in winning the league’s Offensive Rookie of the Year award.
Barkley can be all of that, too. Purely from a physical standpoint, he’s right there with the likes of Lawrence Taylor and Odell Beckham Jr. among the most talented players the Giants have ever drafted. He’s likely the only man on the current roster with a chance to be the best in the world at his position.
He needs to go be that kind of force for the Giants to surprise people and finally deliver a successful season. Barkley needs to handle the final year of his contract the way Aaron Judge is handling his with the Yankees.
That doesn’t necessarily mean a flurry of home runs. One prominent NFL figure with close ties to the Giants said of Barkley: “Too often he swings for the fences. Sometimes we just need Saquon to hit a single or a ball to the opposite side to move the runner over.”
Either way, Barkley is clearly carrying the lumber with a renewed sense of purpose. He told the “2nd Wind” podcast that he’s embracing a “kill mindset” this year and that those who question whether he’ll return to prominence after his torn ACL (2020) and ankle injury (2021) have provided him “the extra motivation to push me to go out there and … shut everyone up.”
Barkley especially wants to shut down the talk that he is too much of an east-west runner who could use a little less Fred Astaire in his approach. “Dancing” has become a dirty word in his playbook, and after Daboll tried to compliment him by saying he “didn’t dance” in the preseason game at New England, Barkley was all over the place last week in his response.
“I’m really kind of fed up with people who never played the position and try to speak on how I run the football,” he said. “We call them All-Pros with clickers in their hand.” Though Barkley wasn’t talking about Daboll in that quote, and though he leaned on semantics to separate the coach’s reference to dancing from the talking heads’ references to dancing, hey, Daboll said what he said. He wants his running backs to hit the hole with a vengeance.
“He’s done everything we’ve asked of him,” Daboll said of Barkley on Wednesday. “He’s been really a pleasure to coach. He’s had a good mindset. He’s learned our stuff. He’s played hard, and he’s ran hard.
“He’s ultra-competitive. He’s very, very competitive. Not just on the field, just really with anything. And you like to see that with your players.”
Before he was drafted in 2018, Barkley told his longtime friend Kayla Cunningham that he wasn’t afraid to go to Cleveland as the first-overall pick and end a championship drought in that city the way LeBron James did. The Browns picked Baker Mayfield instead, leaving Barkley for the Giants. At least their marriage is still intact.
Coming off the knee injury last season, Barkley set goals of winning the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year award, and of getting back to being a 2,000-yard player. He went 0-for-2.
This time around, a healthier, more explosive Barkley is working with more creative coaching (Daboll and offensive coordinator Mike Kafka), two tackles picked in the top seven of their drafts (Andrew Thomas, Evan Neal) and, potentially, an improved quarterback Daniel Jones and more elite playmaking on the outside.
Barkley has the talent to be the best running back in the league. He should go crazy this year and be that player.
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