Eagles Understood the Running Back Market and Scored Saquon Barkley

Philadelphia knew the position was undervalued, and its foresight has paid off. Plus, what makes the Green Bay front office different in Albert Breer’s Tuesday Notes.

Barkley leads the league in rushing yards, helping the Eagles to a 12–3 record. / Peter Casey-Imagn Images

Happy Holidays, everyone. Some Tuesday notes, as my gift to you …

• The Philadelphia Eagles may be one of the most advanced franchises in sports, but it doesn’t take an analytics department to understand how they approached the running back market in March.

Want to one-line it? Here you go …

The idea the position was overvalued prevailed for so long that it actually became undervalued.

Here’s that simple logic in real terms: The price, even at the top of the running back market, was equal to what it cost some teams to pay a second or third receiver. Case in point, Philadelphia’s deal for Saquon Barkley was very similar in total money and guarantees to what the Atlanta Falcons gave Darnell Mooney.

In Mooney’s best season—before this one—he had 87 touches for 1,087 yards and five touchdowns. Barkley, by comparison, had a three-game stretch last year, in his final year as a New York Giant (a lost year for him, by the way) where he had 91 touches.

If a team does a three-year deal at about $13 million per year and it strikes out on someone like Mooney and keeps winning otherwise, it may never be raised as a problem again. But when it happens with a running back, it’s an indictment on the entire position?

Anyway, it certainly caught my attention this offseason when the three biggest buyers on the veteran running back market—the Baltimore Ravens, Eagles and Green Bay Packers—happened to be three perennial playoff teams that generally are ahead of the curve on these things.

You won’t believe what happened next.

The NFL’s rushing leader chart through 16 weeks (and 15 games) …

1) Saquon Barkley, Eagles: 1,838 yards

2) Derrick Henry, Ravens: 1,636 yards

3) Kyren Williams, Los Angeles Rams: 1,243 yards

4) Josh Jacobs, Packers: 1,216 yards

Philly, Baltimore and Green Bay have all clinched playoff spots with two weeks left in the regular season, and have built offensive identities around those veteran backs.

To me, it’s another sign that what’s smart in football is always a moving target.

Those three teams happened to be the cats, rather than the mice.

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• While we’re on the Packers, I think it’s worth applauding two guys today.

First is outgoing Green Bay president Mark Murphy.

What I like most about Murph is his humility—something that is key to how Green Bay’s been run over his 17 seasons in charge (this will be his 13th playoff year in the past 16, which is a league best). He’s overseen the transitions from Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers to Jordan Love, from Mike McCarthy to Matt LaFleur, and from Ted Thompson to Brian Gutekunst. Each of those changeovers was a home run. And he had help with all of that, to be sure.

But welcoming help isn’t some caveat on his legacy. More so, I think it properly contextualizes how good he was at his job. In a world where a lot of owners and business-side people insist on putting their fingerprints on a football team, here you had a former All-Pro player who let his football people do their jobs and was always a resource, rather than a hindrance.

Coaches and scouts often say that the great thing about working in Green Bay is that you don’t have to deal with an owner. The truth is, they feel that way because Murphy, who in many ways serves in an ownership-type role, does things the right way.

And on the humility part, one last story. I covered the lockout day-to-day for NFL Network for half a year in 2011. There were a lot of stakeout days in there. For one, in New York City, I was outside some high-end law firm, by the Port Authority. As owners came in for the talks with the union, black car after black car pulled up to the curb. Then came a yellow cab, and out popped Murphy with his trademark smirk.

I got a picture and posted it on Twitter, thinking it was a pretty funny visual. What I didn’t realize was there was a FlashDancers ad on top of the cab. And no one thought that was funnier—again, amid this parade of luxury SUVs—than Murphy himself.

My second kudos goes to the guys he hired. I don’t know what it’s going to take to get LaFleur voted Coach of the Year, but at some point, he deserves one of those. The 45-year-old is now 67–31, with five playoff appearances in six years and two NFC title game appearances under his belt. He managed the discord between Rodgers and the front office and coached Rodgers to two MVP seasons. He developed Love while that was going on, and had him ready to make a seamless transition.

LaFleur’s proven to be as good a hire as Green Bay could’ve hoped for coming out of a very successful run by McCarthy. He should get some credit for it.

LaFleur has led the Packers to an impressive 11–4 record heading into the final two weeks of the regular season. / Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

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• I want to note Joe Burrow’s appreciation for Ja’Marr Chase here. While the former is leading the NFL in passing yards and touchdown passes, and the latter is closing in on becoming the third receiver in 30 years to win the triple crown (catches, yards, touchdowns).

When I spoke with Burrow on Sunday afternoon, I asked him if he’s at the point now where he can throw it to Chase no matter what.

“Yeah,” Burrow says. “Maybe if there’s a Calvin Johnson double team at the line of scrimmage, I might stay away from that. We’ve hit a lot of different routes and a lot of different coverages, a lot of different situations, and we talk about all of them. We feel comfortable with just about anything.”

That’s a testament to the talent of both guys and the chemistry they’ve built playing together, going back to 2018 at LSU.

And in case you’re wondering what a “Calvin Johnson double team” is …

Louisville has switched to the Calvin Johnson double team strategy against Caitlin Clark pic.twitter.com/qkPHKgWkGv

— Chris B. Brown (@smartfootball) March 27, 2023

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• As we mentioned Monday, the Dallas Cowboys showed a lot Sunday night in how they responded to having gotten the news, just hours earlier, that their faint playoff hopes had died with the Washington Commanders’ comeback win over the Eagles.

To me, it demonstrated the strength of what McCarthy has built.

For all the slings and arrows, the Cowboys very easily could have rolled over against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Instead, the opposite happened.

“I’m proud of our guys, I thought they did a hell of a job kicking ass,” McCarthy told me postgame. “I know it’s been my approach, you try to build a program—programs win year in and year out. Sustained success in this league is the hardest thing. I’ve said this before, I feel like it’s harder to go to the playoffs eight years in a row than it is to win one Super Bowl. That’s been my personal experience.

“We’ve gone three years in a row, with 12-win seasons. And unfortunately, we didn’t make it a fourth year. I think that’s just another example of just how hard this league is.”

It also crystallizes the difficult decision the Jones family has in front of them. I think if McCarthy had a term left on his contract, bringing him back would be a relatively easy decision. Instead, they’ve put themselves in a position where to keep McCarthy, they’ll have to draw up a whole new contract. Will they do it? I’m not 100% sure. But what’s obvious is that a lot of people around McCarthy are helping him make a very strong case.

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• One more leftover from my Sunday conversations: Carolina Panthers coach Dave Canales, on what’s impressed him most in how Bryce Young has handled a weird year.

“The biggest thing I’ve learned about Bryce is he just takes it weekly,” Canales says. “He takes the weekly work. Who is the opponent? How are we trying to attack him? What do I need to work on? Just attacking that with intentionality says a lot about his character, that he was engaged in the whole process, which allowed him when he came back in to get his opportunity, to just build off of the things he was growing from, the things he was learning.

“Then we got into situations in games, we’ve been in a lot of these now, really over the past month and a half, we’ve been in some really close games throughout, and he’s shown an ability to go to the next drive, regardless of what the score is or the time on the clock. He just goes right back to work and operates. Those things have been really impressive to me.”

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• The Diontae Johnson waiver claim illustrates the challenges the Houston Texans face at receiver, with Stefon Diggs and now Tank Dell down for the year.

With Dell sustaining a dislocated kneecap on Saturday against the Kansas City Chiefs, the Texans upped the workload of both weathered veteran Robert Woods and promising second-year man Xavier Hutchinson, with each playing 34 snaps. Woods very clearly isn’t what he once was, but is still dependable and an excellent blocker. And there are still high hopes for Hutchinson in his second year as a good program fit. Getting John Metchie III back will help, too.

That said, Johnson’s produced at a high level, and DeMeco Ryans has built a strong enough program in Houston where the character concern with the former Steeler, Panther and Raven isn’t what it might be somewhere else.

Another place I’d look for the Texans to make up for Dell’s loss is with more 12-personnel (two tight ends) looks. Cade Stover is coming back from an appendectomy and has built-in chemistry with C.J. Stroud from the three years the two spent together at Ohio State. Add what Stover can bring in the run game, and it might make more sense to take the third receiver off the field and lean into a young guy’s potential.

Stover underwent an emergency appendectomy on Dec. 14. / Brian Fluharty-Imagn Images

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 • Aaron Rodgers’s one-liner on Monday’s The Pat McAfee Show was pretty good.

“Being released would be a first,” he said. “Being released by a teenager, that would also be a first.”

Obviously, that was a reference to The Athletic’s story from last week on owner Woody Johnson’s stewardship of the team. It gave a lot of color to our reporting earlier in the year on how Johnson listening to nonfootball voices (including social media) and his sons’ involvement has frustrated the New York Jets’ football folks. 

It’s worth noting here that a lot of owners take themselves very seriously and would fume at an employee making a crack like that. I thought it was funny. Will Woody? I don’t know. Big decisions are coming on the quarterback’s future by the owner, the team and Rodgers himself—and those decisions that are tough to forecast until we know who the next coach and GM will be.

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• I appreciate what Antonio Pierce said about his Las Vegas Raiders’ Sunday win over the Jacksonville Jaguars, and how it might affect the team’s draft position in April.

“We don’t do this to lose," Pierce said Monday. “We don’t do this for anybody’s fantasy football team. We don’t do this for anybody’s draft projections. None of that s--- matters to us. The only thing that matters is winning, and that’s all we want to do.”

That said, there’s definitely a belief in league circles that the Raiders’ football people will be under a mandate to draft a quarterback in the first round in 2025, much like the Indianapolis Colts brass was two years ago. And falling in the draft order could complicate that significantly.

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• I know there’s skepticism over the seriousness of Patrick Mahomes’s ankle injury, but I will say that Chiefs folks were pretty impressed with how intense he was about getting ready for Saturday’s game against the Texans. The quarterback came in last Monday on the players’ day off, got imaging, got the O.K. to get working and then rehabbed basically the entire day while his teammates were recovering.

That positioned him to practice fully on Tuesday, even if he was still hobbled. And by Thursday, he looked like himself again.

So I’d have confidence he’ll look good on Christmas against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

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• Georgia QB Carson Beck’s UCL injury appears to be similar to the one that Brock Purdy sustained two years ago. In case you missed it, Beck underwent surgery at the hands of famed orthopedist Neal ElAttrache in L.A. on Monday.

Purdy underwent surgery on March 10, 2023. In early June, he started throwing three times per week. By the start of training camp, at the end of July, he was fully cleared to throw. Beck’s surgery happened on Dec. 23. So on the Purdy timeline (and obviously, these things can vary), he’d be throwing again in mid-March or so, and he’d probably be cleared by the end of April, right around the draft.

That’s significant, of course, for teams that have a shot to see him throw before making decisions on Beck, who didn’t play great this year, and may have fallen out of the first round before incurring the injury.