Saquon Barkley isn’t dancing around lofty expectations.
With the Giants off to their now-annual miserable start and scoring touchdowns on just three of nine trips to the red zone, Barkley’s lateral running style again is under scrutiny because he is averaging a career-low 3.4 yards per carry. The Giants internally are walking a fine line: Asking him to take more medium gains rather than risk a busted play by always looking for the home run.
“You don’t want to take the Saquon out of Saquon,” offensive coordinator Jason Garrett said. “We’ve talked a lot about dirty runs that nobody talks about but put you in a manageable second-down and third-down situation. He did that the other day. It’s important for us to be able to do that.”
Barkley took just two of 23 carries longer than 5 yards during the first two games back from his torn ACL. He progressed to five on 16 carries (long of 15 yards) last week.
“I don’t want to make any excuses,” Barkley said. “I’m not going to do that throughout this whole season. The expectation that people have for me is not even close to the expectations that I have for myself and it never will be for as long as I play football, or whatever I do after football.”
The running-style conversation has followed Barkley for most of his four years in the NFL but was amplified with the Giants (0-3) ranked No. 25 in points per game (18.7).
“It’s time for them now to have that blunt conversation with Saquon,” Giants radio analyst Carl Banks said this week on WFAN’s “Moose and Maggie” program, “and say, ‘You have to stick your cleats in the ground and get north-and-south. When you have a convoy of blockers in front of you on a power sweep, get in the pocket of one of those blockers and ride it out. Do not get impatient and think you have to break away from that.’ ”
It’s not known if the “blunt conversation” happened.
“If I had to compare myself from Week 1 to Week 3,” Barkley said, “just seeing the cuts and the way that I’m running, definitely improved.”
Wayne Gallman — nowhere near as gifted as Barkley — averaged 4.6 yards per attempt running between the tackles as the injury replacement in Garrett’s offense last season. Barkley is running behind a patchwork line expected Sunday to use its ninth different player in four games.
“The one thing he has to understand right now as a powerful, quick, fast runner who can do a lot of different things, he is taking pressure off of the defense with his running style right now,” said Banks, a former Pro Bowl linebacker. “You want those linebackers to say, ‘Oh crap, this is going to be a collision.’ He’s making it easy for the defenders because, by dancing around, they wrap him up.”
The Giants desperately need Barkley to regain his pre-injury form, when he averaged 5.6 yards per offensive touch and totaled nearly 3,500 yards from scrimmage in 2018-19. In the meantime, Garrett, running backs coach Burton Burns and the Giants will settle for helping move the chains.
“My running backs coach said that I’ve been doing a really good job of sticking [my leg in the ground] and taking what the defense is giving me,” Barkley said. “Carl Banks is well-respected. As a fan of football, when someone like that speaks, you definitely take that into account.”
The Giants quickly scrapped a preseason plan to decrease Barkley’s workload. Devontae Booker, the free-agent replacement for Gallman, was a healthy scratch last week, putting more on Barkley.
“To me, he’s done a remarkably good job,” Garrett said, “and he’s getting better and better the more opportunities he gets.”
Barkley’s season-long run of 41 yards in Week 2 was accompanied by 12 other carries totaling 16 yards, so the Giants saw his Week 3 game as a step forward.
“A lot of 3-, 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-yard runs were positive runs,” Garrett said. “But, in an effort to do that, you never want to take away his ability to make big plays. The space plays that he makes are dynamic. Absolutely we want to be physical, we want to be downhill — he’s a part of that — but you don’t want to take Saquon out of Saquon.”