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Hallie Grossman
SAQUON BARKLEY GOT the phone number through a friend.
It was a few months ago, after his season to end all seasons: The Hurdle; the Eagles’ Super Bowl romp; those 2,504 yards, the most in NFL history when you account for playoff games. Fresh off a run of ridiculous feats, he tried his hand at one more. Barkley sent a prayer of a text to the man whose name is synonymous with chasing historic excellence.
He reached out to Tiger.
Barkley laughs in the retelling, as he stands in the hallway of the team’s practice facility, still in a uniform that sports some light grass stains from training camp earlier this August day. He didn’t actually expect to hear back from Tiger Woods. But here went Barkley’s logic: Woods played some excellent golf in 1999. He won a record eight PGA Tour events. But no one ever talks about that year, or those milestones, Barkley theorizes, because the next year Woods went out and (1) won nine Tour events and (2) lapped everyone else, setting the stage for the first and, to date, only Tiger Slam.
“I texted Tiger, ‘What’s the reason you think you were so successful from ’99 to 2000?'” Barkley says. “Less than 15 minutes later, he responded.”
At this point, Barkley’s children, Jada and Saquon Jr., are at his heels, vying for his attention. He tells Jada, who’s toting S.J. on her back, to be careful and, with his parental advisory dispensed, he laughs again. Pinch him: He was texting back and forth with one of the most revered athletes in history.
And the reply, Barkley says, was great. Rife with insight on how feverishly detailed Woods had been throughout the 1990s, how that rigor prepared him for and led him directly to the avalanche of his 2000 season.
Now, Barkley writes “Tiger Mode” on all the notes he takes himself, and it’s disarming to realize Saquon Barkley, too, can be rendered starstruck. But it’s been that kind of year in Philadelphia for Barkley. The kind where living legends write you back, and you reverse hurdle over a professional football player, and you become the ninth player to ever run for 2,000 yards and just the second to do it and win a Super Bowl. It was a once-in-a-lifetime-type year, which is why it’s unfair but unsurprising that one question now lurks like a shadow over Barkley:
How does he do it all again?
BUT FIRST, REWIND the clock: Six months ago, Barkley lined up next to Jalen Hurts with just under five minutes left in the NFC divisional round. He had no earthly idea if he was lined up correctly at all, then took the handoff anyway, bounced out to his left, and scampered off for a 78-yard, game-sealing touchdown in a veritable snow globe.
On the broadcast of the Philadelphia Eagles’ 28-22 victory over the Los Angeles Rams, an almost giddy Cris Collinsworth tried to interpret the replay of the pre-snap conversation Barkley had with his quarterback. “Look at the communication with Hurts and Barkley. He’s like, ‘I got this. Dude, just hand me the ball. I’m gonna score a touchdown.'”
Turns out, running backs in the midst of once-in-a-lifetime years get the benefit of the doubt. Total confusion can become total confidence. Calling out for help can be mistaken for calling your shot.
Because Barkley’s conversation with Hurts at the line of scrimmage, the QB explains now, wasn’t Barkley divining the future. It was an SOS. “He asked me, ‘What do I have? What are we doing?’ He had no clue what we were doing,” Hurts says. “I said, ‘This is the play. Get goin’.'”
So Barkley got goin’.
Hurts loves that play, a zone read. All these months after the fact, he still considers it his favorite memory of Barkley in a year full of rosy and ridiculous ones. Here’s why: In the throes of training camp a few weeks back, the two were discussing the idea of preparation. Barkley asked Hurts if Hurts played chess. Hurts responded, “Chess, golf, pool are no different. It’s about ingrained behavior.”
Once Barkley actually knew what the call was, he also knew he had drilled that play enough to make it second nature. Hurts figures it’s the perfect embodiment of preparation, and more, what he loves about ingrained behavior. No need to panic. No need to show emotion, which is, famously, Hurts’ favorite way to express himself.
After Hurts told Barkley the play and handed off the ball, Barkley hadn’t even crossed the line of scrimmage, 75 yards away from the end zone with five would-be tacklers in his path, when Hurts raised his arms to signal for a touchdown. Then, when Barkley crossed the goal line, Hurts did something startling, at least by Hurts-adjusted metrics. And it offers a blueprint for how Barkley might just be able to pull all this off again.
Hurts smiled.
Or, rather, Saquon Barkley made him smile.
THREE WEEKS LATER, in the waning moments of Super Bowl LIX, Barkley found Hurts on the sideline, and wanted to know one thing. “Jalen Hurts gonna smile now?”
The game wasn’t over over, but it was over. The Eagles’ lead over the Chiefs had dwindled, down from 40-6 at its peak to 40-22 in garbage time, but a rout is a rout is a rout, so Barkley went to Hurts and wondered if even a proper shellacking might merit a grin. It would not. Hurts, miked up for the game, told him: “When that s— hit zero-zero.”
He had more to say.
“Hey, man,” Hurts said to Barkley. “That’s you. That’s you. That’s you.”
Hurts’ declaration wasn’t necessarily breaking news. A 2,000-yard season would help any team — but it wouldn’t help any team become a Super Bowl-winning one. Before Barkley, only Terrell Davis rushed for 2,000 yards and won a Super Bowl in the same year. The seven other running backs in the 2,000-yard club either didn’t see the playoffs at all or lost in the wild-card round.
Still, Barkley tried to insist the title win was everyone. Hurts shot him down. “I know it’s all of us,” he told him. “But you don’t understand the difference you made. We right there. But you that last piece, man.”
THE TRICKY PART about team chemistry is that it is not actually science. But when Eagles left tackle Jordan Mailata folds himself into an office chair — he’s 6-8 and 365 pounds; the mere fact that he succeeds is something of a marvel — and calls Barkley the yin to Hurts’ yang, the observation sounds peer-reviewed, precise.
“Because One” — he holds up his pointer finger to signify he means No. 1, Hurts — “is so cool, calm, collected all the time. That we have Saquon to be there as well, it is a breath of fresh air.”
Mailata knows Hurts. “Stone cold,” he says. “This is not a knock on J, ’cause that’s just J.”
The team knows Hurts. “Stoic,” says linebacker Nakobe Dean. “He’s got a stoic calmness,” says running backs coach Jemal Singleton. “Stoic, doesn’t say much,” says offensive lineman Kendall Lamm, who played with the team for a short stint in the preseason before he was released, but long enough to grasp Hurts’ vibe.
Hurts knows Hurts. “Our presence is felt, Saquon and I,” he says. “So I may say a simple word like, ‘Hey, focus. Let’s go.’ He may say 10 more words — way more words than I say — just to get the same message across, if you get what I’m saying.
“I think he’s just the right balance.”
Hurts operates at exactly one frequency — “Even when he’s throwing an 80-yard bomb,” Mailata says — and Barkley very much does not. He’s chatty, and he cheeses in the huddle (“A goofy smirk,” says right tackle Lane Johnson) and generally manages to force-feed some lightness into a game so severe and self-serious that war metaphors are its native language.
These Barkleyian traits, loquaciousness and lightheartedness, are as venerated as they are transformative. He helped bring them to the Eagles, helped offer a counterpoint to grave sobriety. To a man, his teammates and coaches swear not only that it matters, but that it made them something new, and capable of new things. After the Super Bowl, not long after Hurts told Barkley he was Philadelphia’s missing piece, Nick Sirianni offered his own estimation: “You changed this team,” the coach told Barkley.
He has worked at fostering relationships here, just as he worked to mold his talent into a generational one. Barkley has a smile that, conservatively, takes up 90% of his face and a demeanor that his contemporaries describe in decidedly un-football terms. He’s kind.
Singleton spent all of last season watching Barkley practically bear-hug one of his backups, Will Shipley. He’s at it again this season, too, early days though it is. Barkley, like nearly every starter on the Eagles, did not dress for the exhibition portion of the 2025 program, so Shipley got the starting nod for the first preseason game against Cincinnati, then promptly gashed the Bengals on a 38-yard run on his second handoff of the game. By the time the Eagles capped the drive with their first (backup quarterback-led) tush push score of the year, Barkley found Shipley on the sideline, very much ignored Shipley’s personal space, and walked Shipley through why the run was great, but why he didn’t need that stiff arm at all.
He stayed put on the sideline this time, at least. Last season, after Shipley burned Washington in the playoffs for a 57-yard run all the way to the Commanders’ 7-yard line, Barkley offered Singleton a heads-up: “If he scores, I’m running on the field.”
Singleton, resigned to this fate, said fine, sure, but put on a helmet first.
“I remember telling Will that on the sidelines last year,” Singleton says. “Said, ‘Hey, just understand, not every rookie gets it this way. Not every rookie has a front-row seat to this, and not every rookie gets endeared by the vet that’s in the room.'”
Young guys, veterans, stoic team leaders? They’re all fair game for Barkley’s charm offensive. Rookies Jihaad Campbell and Kyle McCord both separately recall Barkley making his way to their cafeteria table on the first or second day of OTAs to have them come sit with him and the veterans. Offensive lineman Darian Kinnard spent last season and the bulk of this preseason in Philadelphia before he was traded to Green Bay, and says he watched Barkley practically demand a relationship with Hurts — making the effort sound a little like Barkley wormed his way into Hurts’ heart and refuses to vacate the premises.
“Sometimes J gets in his own head,” Kinnard says. “And I feel like just having Saquon there as this unfiltered guy just helped him open up. People now see more of Jalen than they used to.”
Barkley is a human pressure relief valve and that, as much as any one of the 2,504 yards he notched last season, made a difference. For the team. For Hurts.
Brandon Graham is the longest-tenured Eagle of all time. For 15 seasons, until he retired after the Super Bowl last winter, he was the custodian of the franchise. He was there in the pre-Barkley era and there for its onset, so he understood a franchise paradigm shift when he saw one.
“He was the cherry on top,” Graham says of Barkley. “Somebody that we needed to take the pressure off Jalen.”
IN THE END, it came down to math: one of the best running backs in the league plus one of the best offensive lines in the league equaled an extraordinary rushing attack. And, on the field, he made life a lot easier for Hurts.
Barkley did not break Eric Dickerson’s single-season rushing record. But behold what he did manage:
He had long runs, seven of them touchdowns that surpassed 60 yards, the most ever.
He had timely runs. By the end of the playoffs, 755 of his yards had come in the fourth quarter, the most by any player in a season in the past 45 years. He scored eight touchdowns then, too.
He had gut-punchy runs. The dash through the snow against the Rams. Philadelphia’s first play from scrimmage the next week against Washington in the NFC Championship Game. The Commanders had inched their way down the field to open the game with a field goal. It took them seven minutes and 18 plays. It took Barkley 18 seconds to crush their souls with a 60-yard touchdown run.
He gently rewired the delicate balance of Philadelphia’s team dynamic; he sledgehammered a new identity for the offense entirely. A run-centric team? In this passing economy? The Eagles ran it more than anyone (51% of their plays were designed rushes; no other team breached 50%, period). Meanwhile, Barkley ran up a league-high 345 attempts in the regular season alone; 436 by the time the Lombardi Trophy was back with Philadelphia.
Four months after the best, most heavily utilized season of his life, Barkley stood on a baseball field in his hometown. He was in Allentown for DeVonta Smith’s charity softball game, sending the locals into literal hysterics. At one point, as he approached the netting that separated the stands from the field to sign autographs, it seemed plausible that netting might give. It was simply not made to sustain the pressure of hundreds of Pennsylvanians surging forward as one, desperate to get closer to Barkley.
Theirs was a fleeting glimpse anyway. Barkley didn’t play in the game, and stayed on the field only for the home run derby, which, as it turned out, came with its own risk of bodily harm. Smith had recruited some of the best athletes on the planet to play in this charity game: his own Super Bowl-winning teammates. In a plot twist, their artistry on the football field did not translate to the softball field. Many of their batting stances were eyesores, their mastery of directing the ball toward the outfield dubious.
When one errant decidedly not home run sailed past Barkley down the third-base line, one of those teammates saw the near-miss and hollered his disapproval of the whole affair.
“Heads-up! You’re precious cargo!”
JAMAL LEWIS RAN for 2,066 yards as a Raven in 2003. When he returned for the 2004 season, the first thing his coach Brian Billick had to tell him was bleak: “That probably won’t happen again.”
Hater, Lewis thought.
Questionable bedside manner aside, Billick wasn’t hating so much as reading the football tea leaves. No one — before Lewis ran for 2,000 yards, or after — has ever managed to do it twice. Most haven’t gotten all that close. Of the eight rushers who did it before Barkley, only Derrick Henry has come within 100 yards of doing so again.
At the start of training camp, Barkley said he hadn’t consulted any of his predecessors about the demands of following up a 2,000-yard season. That’s probably for the best. Their consensus: The task ahead is hard in a soul-changing kind of way.
“I’m happy I got 2,000 yards,” Lewis says. “But I think ‘burden’ is … It’s a lot to live up to. ‘I just got 2,000 yards, where else do I go?’ And that’s just to do it again, right?”
So Lewis chased the jackpot games, those 200-yard and 250-yard pummelings.
And Dickerson chased 2,000 yards, because he got his two years into his career and figured he ought to just do it again, especially when he considered any year with fewer than 1,500 yards a prosaic one. “Oh, of course, yeah,” he says. “When you start getting close, then people start talking about it and you start thinking about it.”
And LaDainian Tomlinson came close to 2,000 yards the year he set a record with 28 rushing touchdowns, then chased the idea that it wasn’t all a happy accident. “You wanna prove that season wasn’t a fluke,” he says. “That you can back it up, that you can do it again.”
If coaching has a gospel, it’s this: Do not, under any circumstances, look back or look ahead. Stuck in the past? You won’t get a thing done in the present. Daydreaming about what’s next? Ditto. Singleton says that’s his guiding ethos for Barkley. Every season in this league is its own beast, so he does not want Barkley to plan this year through the prism of this past one. “Can you learn lessons from it? Absolutely. Can you bring some of that information with you? Yes, you can,” he says. “But last year’s over. Last year does not exist.”
If there’s no last year, there’s no again, which might be its own kind of freedom. From expectations, from letdown, from comparison. Unless you’re a person — like Lewis, like Dickerson, like Tomlinson and, chances are, like Barkley — for whom “again” isn’t a dirty word. For whom “again” is the reason for their being. For here is what’s at the heart of all that chasing, they say. They believe, in that same soul-changing kind of way, they can do it again. They’ve made it to the professional stage, actual god-tier ranks. The odds are slim? What are odds? They eat odds for breakfast.
“You get there and you’re like, ‘Man, I’m in the less than 1%,'” Tomlinson says. “‘I can do anything.”’
In other words, and in the words of fellow members of that less than 1%, who spoke to us on the eve of Barkley’s second act:
You’re wired to think you can do it again
We’re not trained to think, “Oh, nobody can do this again. It’s never been done again so I can’t do it.” That’s not how we’re wired. — Tomlinson, Hall of Fame Class of 2017
but you’re not supposed to think about doing it again
If you study the history of the game, a person can run for 2,000, run and lead the league, and then disappear. — Edgerrin James, Hall of Fame Class of 2020
but everyone else is thinking about you doing it again
Now they’re really going to make sure this dude cannot beat us. My coach was like, “Man, they got 14 Riddells out there, we can’t run the ball!” I’m like, “Coach, you right! How the hell they get 14 people on the field?” That’s how I felt, I was being hit so much when I came back after my 2,000-yard season. — Terrell Davis, 2,000-yard rusher (1998), Hall of Fame Class of 2017
but you can learn the lessons of years past
As a running back, you have to evolve. You have to become a better version of yourself than you were last year. If you are continually evolving, then they can’t get a bead on you. — Jerome Bettis, Hall of Fame Class of 2015
but you can’t look back, never look back
Are you willing to wipe the board clean and start over? The score is 0-0. What you did last year doesn’t count at all. — Earl Campbell, Hall of Fame Class of 1991
but you can’t chase what’s next
I had a 295-yard game. I had 200-yard games, you know? So when that happens, you start chasing the home run. But the key to your composure is staying poised and not looking for that home run. Because you miss it. My coach used to say you miss a hole trying to run in a hole. — Lewis, 2,000-yard rusher (2003)
but you’re here to show it wasn’t a fluke
I used to look for the negative stuff. I used that to give me the fire to go. — Frank Gore, third-leading rusher in NFL history; eligible for the Hall of Fame Class of 2026
because you don’t think it was a fluke
I don’t think you need to forget it happened. I think you need to shine it up, put it on the shelf as a trophy to look at, and then aspire to do it again. — Larry Csonka, Hall of Fame Class of 1987
since you’re wired to think you can do it again.
“If you can’t have 1,500 yards rushing, then that wasn’t a really good season.” That’s the mindset I had. Because 1,000 yards, that ain’t nothing. — Dickerson, 2,000-yard rusher (1984), Hall of Fame Class of 1999
It’s an exhaustive and exhausting circle, and Barkley has just boarded football’s dizzying merry-go-round.
“Why not?” he pondered during a recent radio interview, of the chance to, at some point, break Dickerson’s long-standing record. Of the chance to literally run it back: “Why not? There might be another opportunity, whether it’s this year or the years coming up.”
Surprise, he’s wired to think he can do it again.
BUT CAN HE?
When it comes to those 2,000 yards, history (hater) says don’t even entertain the thought. The running back body is human and it only has so many yards and so many hits it can withstand. That matters. Perhaps his reserve is tapped dry. Or maybe just tapped a whole lot.
But there’s also this: Few running backs are gifted the 4.17 yards before contact per rush that this Eagles offensive line gave Barkley last year. (According to ESPN Research, since 2009, there have been 43 instances of a player with 300 rush attempts. No one had more contact-free yards than Barkley.) And not a lot of running backs rattle off the nine runs of 50-plus yards he did in 2024. (His were the most in 25 years.) Barkley was simply running in the clear more than most, and maybe that matters, too.
Lucky for Barkley, there are plenty of things a running back can do besides surpass 2,000 yards that count as phenomenal years, that can help propel a team to a Super Bowl, that can maybe even lead that team to several Super Bowls.
Hurts said Barkley was the Eagles’ last piece. Barkley’s teammates said he was that last piece because of who he was, even more so than because of what he did.
And so it is that in the thick of training camp, Barkley takes a knee on the sideline, about 3 yards from where Hurts takes a knee. Their left arms sit on their left legs, chins resting on hands, a pair of Thinkers in the dog days of August. They even have similar earrings. For one misleading moment, they look very much the same.
The moment doesn’t last.
Soon enough, in team drills with the starters watching off to the side, quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson launches a deep ball to wide receiver Giles Jackson. It’s good for a 50-yard touchdown that almost no one will recall after today. In a few weeks, neither Thompson-Robinson nor Jackson will even be on the team. But on this day, in this moment, there is exactly one man elated enough to warrant a reprimand.
“SAQUON!”
Singleton yells at his running back, who is so overcome with sheer joy at this 50-yard bomb that he, once again, can’t stay confined to the sideline. He runs onto the field to leap onto Jackson by way of congratulations, then manages to get in the way of the offense’s 2-point conversion attempt.
“SAQUON!”
“What?!” he hollers back. “We can’t celebrate!?”
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