Saquon Barkley and the Giants unexpectedly agreed to a one-year contract worth up to $11 million on Tuesday morning to stave off a training camp holdout, a source told the Daily News.
The deal is a humbling and shocking one for Barkley to accept.
He gets $10.091 million guaranteed by signing the franchise tag tender, including $2 million as a signing bonus. The Giants still retain the ability to tag Barkley a second straight offseason in spring 2024 if they wish.
And Barkley can earn up to an additional $909,000 in incentives that are all contingent on a 2023 Giants postseason berth, according to a source.
He’ll get $303,000 if he rushes for 1,350 yards and the Giants make the playoffs. He’ll get $303,000 if he scores 11 total touchdowns (either rushing or receiving) and the team makes the playoffs. And he’ll get $303,000 if he has 65 catches and they reach the postseason.
Signing Barkley, 26, on the day that Giants players reported for camp in East Rutherford, N.J., was an enormous victory for second-year GM Joe Schoen, head coach Brian Daboll and the organization.
Barkley appeared prepared to sit out all of training camp after failing to sign a long-term contract prior to the July 17 deadline. He could have missed the entire preseason without costing himself a dime, since he wasn’t technically on the roster.
He declined only one week ago to sign a multi-year offer from the Giants that was believed to be in the neighborhood of $12-12.5 million a year with $22-25 million guaranteed. And now he’s in on the one-year franchise tag.
But Barkley instead took his medicine after being out-leveraged and cornered during a nine-month negotiation that grew contentious down the stretch.
“Obviously we are glad we were able to work things out with Saquon,” Schoen said in a statement to the team website. “We all recognize the player and person Saquon is and what he means to our team. He is a good teammate, a leader and a really good player. We are looking forward to getting on the field tomorrow.”
Barkley joins the Dallas Cowboys’ Tony Pollard as running backs to have signed their franchise tag tenders this offseason. The Las Vegas Raiders’ Josh Jacobs, last season’s leading NFL rusher (1,653 yards), is not expected to report to camp or sign anytime soon, sources said.
Running backs have experienced a dramatic devaluing of their position in the NFL market. Former Philadelphia Eagle Miles Sanders topped all of this year’s free agent running back contracts at $6.35 million per year with the Carolina Panthers. The Minnesota Vikings cut Dalvin Cook outright.
Barkley jumped on a Saturday Zoom meeting with the L.A. Chargers’ Austin Ekeler, the Cleveland Browns’ Nick Chubb, the 49ers’ Christian McCaffrey and the Tennessee Titans’ Derrick Henry to discuss how to proceed. But they recognized this was a dead end for now.
“Right now it’s just talking; there’s really nothing we can do,” Chubb told reporters on Sunday. “We’re kind of handcuffed with the situation.”
Le’Veon Bell’s 2018 season-long holdout with the Pittsburgh Steelers, and the subsequent spiraling of his career, remains a cautionary tale. It was clearly a road Barkley wasn’t interested in going down.
“I have no worry about going on a football field and knowing that I’m not playing for my worth,” Barkley said on The Money Matters podcast June 11. “Because this is my leverage: my leverage is I could say f–k you to the Giants. I could say f–k 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. … Anybody [who] knows me knows that’s not something I want to do.”
Barkley still could have put significant pressure on the Giants by skipping camp. The team’s other backfield options are Matt Breida, Gary Brightwell, rookie Eric Gray, James Robinson and Jashaun Corbin. But the two-time Pro Bowler opted against holding the Giants’ feet to the fire.
Back in March, Barkley emerged from a face-to-face meeting with co-owner John Mara and told his agent to “get it done,” only to be franchise-tagged and lose all leverage when the team signed quarterback Daniel Jones.
Tuesday felt similar. It felt like Barkley had accepted the harsh reality of his situation, stopped listening to someone else, decided enough was enough, and chose the path that got him back on the field and gave the 2023 Giants the best chance to win.
By doing that, Barkley at least protected his image as a team-first player against critics who might have accused him of otherwise if he’d sat out August and into the regular season.
The Giants’ running back has aspirations beyond football, calculates his actions accordingly, and knows that New York gives him the best platform to achieve all of his goals. He also wants to bring a championship to the franchise that drafted him No. 2 overall in 2018.
Winning a Super Bowl is still a long-term goal for this rebuilding franchise, but Barkley’s signing clearly improves the short-term outlook entering Daboll’s second-year.
The Giants (9-7-1) made the playoffs for the first time since 2016 and won a playoff game for the first time since their 2011 Super Bowl season in Daboll’s rookie campaign. And Barkley was a big part of it.
He rushed for 1,312 yards, catching 57 passes for 338 yards, and scoring 10 touchdowns all on the ground. And he said he believes he can contribute more in the passing game, although last season’s offensive game plan had to adjust to account for the team’s personnel.
Barkley admitted recently on The Money Matters Podcast, in fact, that the Giants’ comparisons of him to two “downhill” runners got in his head when negotiations began last fall and impacted how he viewed his usage on the field.
The Giants’ initial November offer averaged $12-12.5 million per season with an unknown amount of guaranteed money. Barkley didn’t accept and chose to bet on himself instead.
The team eventually increased its offer in January and February to around $13 million a year and a reported $26 million guaranteed, and then pulled that offer off the table and reset the talks once it used the franchise tag on Barkley in mid-March.
A Tuesday report by ProFootballTalk said Barkley’s agent then asked the team to call other NFL teams and seek a potential trade. The report said the Giants called a dozen teams in March/April and found no takers.
A source told the Daily News, however, that trading Barkley was never a consideration for the Giants.
Barkley remained miffed about the “misleading” contract offers that got leaked in the spring. So he went public with his frustration in June at his AMPT Events kids’ football camp in Jersey City, questioning the team’s integrity in the process.
He said he wanted “respect.” He said the guaranteed money in the Giants’ best offer wasn’t what had been reported (not all guaranteed money is “fully” guaranteed; mechanisms such as per-game roster bonuses can hedge a team’s bets, especially when a player has an injury history). And he resented that the leaks had tried to make him look “greedy.”
Soon after, Barkley switched lead agents from Roc Nation’s Kim Miale to CAA’s Edward Berry, Barkley’s marketing agent, to revive the relationship and negotiation. But it was too late to move the needle enough for the sides to compromise on a multi-year agreement.
Now, even if Barkley has a monster 2023 season, the Giants still can tag him at $12.1 million on a one-year contract next year. Now, even if Barkley produces, he won’t be able to earn his incentive money if the Giants fail to make the playoffs a second straight year.
And yet Tuesday was a good day, because the Giants got Barkley in the building and under contract, and the team can now focus on anything but one of its best players holding out.
