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The Philadelphia Eagles on Tuesday signed running back Saquon Barkley to a monster two-year contract extension worth $41.2 million. Barkley had just signed with Philly last offseason, inking a three-year, $37.75 million pact to leave the New York Giants for their division rivals. Less than a year later, he’s cashing in, in a big way and is now set to be the highest-paid running back ever.
Coming off a season wherein Barkley rushed for over 2,000 yards and scored 15 total touchdowns while helping the Eagles win the Super Bowl, it makes sense for him to be rewarded. And coming off a season where not only was Barkley uber-successful, but so was fellow 2024 free-agent signing Derrick Henry, who rushed for 1,921 yards and 16 touchdowns after signing a two-year, $16 million deal with the Baltimore Ravens, it’s got a lot of people thinking that high-priced running backs are, well … back.
It’s important that NFL teams don’t buy wholesale into this idea. Barkley and Henry were wildly successful this past season in part because they are wildly talented players. They are two of the most unique physical freaks to ever play the position, and they showed it week in and week out in 2024. But they were also wildly successful because of their specific situations, and we don’t have to look much further than the previous few years of their respective careers to know this. (And because they stayed healthy, which obviously is not a guarantee for a running back — even if 2024 was an outlier year for health at the position.)
Barkley averaged just 4.1 yards per carry and had a 43.6% rushing success rate across his final three seasons with the Giants. His 2023 campaign was arguably the worst of his career as a runner, with a 3.9 yards-per-carry average and a 40.1% success rate. Playing in a poor offensive ecosystem in New York, he just wasn’t very effective.
Transport him to Philly and put him behind arguably the NFL’s best offensive line, though, and suddenly he goes from 0.98 yards before contact per carry in 2023, via TruMedia, to 2.64 yards before contact per carry in 2024. And that’s how you get a massive jump in rushing efficiency.
It’s a similar story with Henry. He still led the NFL in carries in 2022 and 2023 (and led on a per-game basis in 2021), but he failed to top 4.4 yards per carry in any of those three years following his back-to-back league-leading rushing seasons in 2019 and 2020. He dropped from a career-high 5.4 yards per carry in 2020 to 4.3, then 4.4, then 4.2 before signing with Baltimore last offseason.
Put him behind the Ravens’ offensive line and next to Lamar Jackson in the backfield, though, and magic happens. Henry had the most efficient rushing season of his career, ripping off 5.9 yards a pop and racking up a 58.8% rushing success rate. Henry, like Barkley, saw a massive jump in yards before contact, going from averaging 0.85 in 2023 to 2.41 in 2024.
Some team out there is going to see what those guys did and think the solution to its problems is to splash the pot for a running back in free agency. And that team is probably going to be wrong. Because that running back almost surely won’t be as much of a physical outlier as either Barkley or Henry, and that team almost surely will not have as strong an offensive infrastructure around the running back as did the Eagles and Ravens. (The Eagles also kept Barkley’s cap hit artificially low by giving him a low base salary in Year 1 and adding several void years onto his contract. So he only counted for around $3.5 million against the cap in 2024.)
Ahead of a draft that has one of the deepest running back classes in recent years, and with a free agent running back crop that is headlined by players like Aaron Jones (who is 31 years old), Najee Harris, Rico Dowdle, J.K. Dobbins and Javonte Williams, rather than the likes of Barkley, Henry, Josh Jacobs, Tony Pollard and more (and in a year where it was considered to be a bad running back draft class), teams would be wise to spend with caution, or they’ll have learned the wrong lesson from two of the best running back seasons in recent memory.
