NEW YORK — A measured Saquon Barkley sounds prepared to play on the franchise tag for the Giants this season, although he is seriously mulling a regular-season holdout.
Barkley said in a July 11 interview on The Money Matters Podcast with Jack Mallers, which just didn’t go live until this week, that he learned last season to not take the business side of football personally once he hits the field.
But he still knows his options.
“I have no worry about going on a football field and knowing that I’m not playing for my worth or saying if I have to play, because this is my leverage: my leverage is I could say f--- you to the Giants,” Barkley said. “I could say f--- you to my teammates and be like, ‘You want me to show you my worth? You want me to show how valuable I am to the team? I won’t show up. I won’t play a down. And that’s a play I can use.
“Anybody [who] knows me knows that’s not something I want to do,” he continued. “But is that something that’s crossed my mind? I never thought I would ever do that, but now I’m at a point where it’s like ‘Jesus, like, I might have to take it to this level.’ Am I willing and prepared to take it to the level? I don’t know.”
Barkley said a holdout is “something I gotta sit down and talk to my family [about]. I gotta sit down and talk to my team. [I] gotta really strategize about this. I can’t just go off of emotions … But I am at a place where if I do go on the field and have to play and prove again, I’m fine with that.”
Barkley sprinkled in plenty of encouraging sentiment about the Giants, New York and even team co-owner John Mara. It seemed to indicate he doesn’t want to play anywhere else and there’s a good chance he will be on the field in Week 1 against the Dallas Cowboys.
“I live in New Jersey, I got a beautiful home, my family loves it, I’m close to my family,” Barkley said, days before failing to agree to a long-term deal with the team. “For me, I don’t want to go anywhere else. I just wanna get to football.”
“I see myself doing a lot more after football,” he added. “I know I live in New Jersey, but I know right across that bridge, that’s the greatest place to do it.”
Barkley said a gratifying face-to-face meeting with Mara in the spring actually prompted the running back to tell his agent to “get it done” at a certain number, but a deal wasn’t reached and the Giants franchise tagged him.
“That was the only time I really got involved in the negotiation process,” Barkley said. “I sat down with the owner. The owner told me what it was, told me how they care about me. And this is when we were still going tit for tat [with offers] … The owner opened up to me. And I respected that. Like you called me in as a man, you sat me down as a man, we looked each other eye to eye, told me how much you feel about me.
“I let you [Mara] know how much I feel about this place, how much I feel about your family, … how much I feel about [Steve] Tisch’s family,” Barkley continued. “That’s when I picked up the phone and I called my agent and I was like, ‘I don’t care, let’s get it done. Like boom, this is where I want to be, this is the number I’m fine with, boom, let’s get there.’ ”
But the tag changed the tenor of the talks.
“When you get tagged, now they have the tag, now it’s like, ‘You know what Saquon? If we really want to, we don’t have to offer you anything.’ ”
Barkley, 26, said he gained his perspective on not taking the negotiations personally last season, though, when the Giants’ bye week contract offer, a disagreement about Barkley’s strengths and weaknesses, and Barkley’s subsequent in-game usage got in his head.
Barkley said the Giants presented him with two player comps who were “downhill runners” and “running backs who really aren’t used in the pass catching-game” while making their initial offer.
Barkley disagreed with those comparisons, and not just because of his past production. He said the Giants’ initial 2022 offensive plan had been to involve Barkley significantly in the passing game until the team abruptly pivoted.
“I can run routes. I can get open. I’m a playmaker. I can be used like that,” Barkley said. “I’m only doing this because this is what the team needs me to do. I trained my ass off the prior offseason. Usually I play at 233 [pounds]. I cut weight down. I was like 227, 226. Because the whole summer and the whole OTAs, I was used more like a Christian McCaffrey type. So I’m thinking alright, that’s what I’m gonna have to do.
“But then — I don’t want to get too deep, because I don’t want to try to speak on other people’s situations – we had to go to a focal point where they have to hand the ball to me 30 times to help me win a football game,” Barkley continued. “And I’m fine with that. So the reason why I’m fine with if I have to play on that [is] because I learned my lesson.”
The lesson-learning part, Barkley said, began with the Giants’ very next game after the bye. After being told by the Giants that he was a downhill runner, Barkley received a career-high 35 carries in a 24-16 home win over the Houston Texans on Nov. 13. And he mentally drew a connection between the contract disagreement and his usage, which weighed on him.
“They offered me a bye-week deal, and then they told me the type of player I am, and then they showed me,” Barkley said. “That next week I carried the ball 35 times … and we won the game. But it was literally set-hut, boom, set-hut, boom, set-hut, boom. It was just me ramming my head. And that’s why I’m at a place where you gotta be more mature about this.
“Because I had two or three games where credit to the teams, they played well,” Barkley continued. “A focal point when we play the Giants is to stop me. I’m fully aware of that. But I do think a lot of that was on myself because I’m in my head, like, ‘These motherf------ are telling me what I am and they’re showing me. Nah, f--- them.’ I’m in my mind.
He added: “I [was] coming home. I [was] still training but … it took me two or three weeks where I’m like, ‘That’s not it, don’t take it personal, you can’t take it personal. You gotta go out and ball. You gotta still go out and perform.’ That’s why I’m at a place where I’m — if I have to do it, like, f--- it.”
Barkley in no way is backing down from his negotiating position on his value to the Giants. In fact, his pride shined through when he said that his contract ask wasn’t even as high as it could have been.
“I’m not even asking for what I’m worth,” Barkley said. “Because I just told you I’m the best running back in the NFL. But I’m not going to war for that. In the negotiation process, I’m not going to war for that.”
Barkley wanted to set the record straight that “$10 million [on the franchise tag] is a lot of money, especially when you look at the economics of our country and you look at the people in our country and where the poverty rate is. And I’m a person that comes from that.”
That’s why he didn’t want people to misunderstand his position or viewing him as greedy. He said he’s still sensitive to those dynamics while trying to look out for himself.
Ultimately, what he wants to do is bring a championship to the Giants and New York, he said.
“For me, I was like, you know what, I can go there, I can go to war, try to get as much money as I can, but at the end of the day, what really matters is winning, and winning a championship,” Barkley said. “And I know if I’m able to help bring a championship to New York, that’s going to go miles more ahead than this contract.”
Only Barkley knows what he’ll do once the regular season arrives. But if winning remains his primary goal after failing to get a long-term contract done, his next move hopefully will help the Giants and their fans breathe a sigh of relief.
