Saquon Barkley historic season resulted in the Philadelphia Eagles running back becoming the highest-paid player for his position in NFL history. Barkley signed a two-year contract extension worth $41.2 million, as he becomes the first running back to make $20+ million a year.
The extension was well earned by Barkley, who had one of the greatest seasons ever for any player in league history — his first season with the Eagles. Barkley rushed for 2,005 yards and 13 touchdowns in the regular season, the ninth player in league history to rush for 2,000 yards. He had seven touchdown runs of 60+ yards this season (including playoffs), an NFL record for a season and three more than the next-highest player. Three touchdown runs of 60+ yards runs have come in the postseason, a feat which no other player has accomplished in their entire playoff career.
Barkley finished with the most rushing yards in a season in NFL history with 2,504 (including playoffs), the first player ever to have 2,500 rushing yards in a season. He also finished with 2,857 yards from scrimmage, the most ever in a season in league history (including playoffs). He’s one of only three running backs to win Offensive Rookie of the Year, Offensive Player of the Year, and a Super Bowl title — joining Marcus Allen and Marshall Faulk (both are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame).
The Eagles rewarded Barkley for his tremendous season, while also making sure he finished his career in a Eagles uniform. The extension will pay Barkley through his prime seasons, and reset the running back market as a result.
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.
Saquon Barkley contract extension: Highest-paid RBs in NFL after Eagles star resets market for position Jeff Kerr Saquon Barkley contract extension: Highest-paid RBs in NFL after Eagles star resets market for position 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.
It’s official, JJ Watt won’t be coming out of retirement. For the past two months, there had been a chance that the three-time defensive player of the year was going to return to the NFL in 2025 over a bet he made, but that chance has now gone out the window.
The bet involved Watt and James Trafford, a huge Cincinnati Bengals fan who happens to be the goalkeeper for Burnley FC. Watt and his wife, Kealia, own a stake in Burnley, a soccer team that plays in the English Football League’s (EFL) Championship division.
Back in December, Trafford asked Watt if he’d be willing to come out of retirement to play for the Bengals and Watt half-jokingly responded that he would do it, but only if Trafford went the rest of the EFL season without surrendering a single goal.
The tweet above is from January, but the two had the text message exchange on Dec. 28 and up to that point, Trafford had allowed just nine goals in 22 league starts, which is impressive. But to win the bet with Watt, the 22-year-old Trafford would have to finish the season by recording 24 shutouts (clean sheets) in a row.
Considering the all-time English record by any keeper is 14 shutouts in a row, this didn’t seem like anything Watt would have to worry about, but things suddenly got very real for the former Texans star after Trafford went 12 games in a row without giving up a goal. However, that streak finally came to an end on March 4 after Cardiff City’s Yousef Salech put a wild header past Trafford in the 42nd minute.
The goal by Salech ended Trafford’s streak of 12 straight clean sheets, which will go down as the second longest streak by ANY keeper in English soccer history.
After Salech scored, Watt reacted on social media.
Before the streak ended, both sides were definitely having fun with it. As recently as last week, the Burnley social media team had made sure to remind Watt of how well Trafford was playing.
Trafford was so good in January that he was named the EFL Championship player of the month.
Trafford’s streak started on Dec. 26 and went more than two months before ending on Tuesday.
If Trafford had gone the entire EFL season without giving up a goal, Watt would have definitely come out of retirement. Although Watt seems to love his job as a studio analyst on “The NFL Today” here at CBS Sports, he was dead serious about making an NFL return.
During an interview on The Dan Patrick Show this week, Watt made it clear that he would have been happy to play for the Bengals if Trafford’s improbable run of consecutive clean sheets had continued.
“I’ll do it,” Watt said of returning to the NFL. “If he does that, which is insane, we have 12 or 13 games left. If he does it, it’s insane enough and respectful enough that I will absolutely follow through. Who knows if the [Bengals] even want me? I don’t even know. I haven’t talked to them, but I’m in shape, I’ll go play.”
The Bengals had one of the worst defenses in the NFL last season, so there’s a good chance they would have welcomed Watt with open arms.
Burnley became a popular team in Cincinnati during the streak with Bengals fans hoping that Trafford could pull off the improbable feat.
“We’ve created a lot of Clarets fans in Cincinnati, which is really cool,” Watt told Patrick. “We’re getting a lot bigger ratings and numbers from the Ohio region.”
During the interview, Watt admitted that he never expected things to get this far.
