Saquon Barkley spoke to reporters after Eagles practice on Thursday and was asked about teammate A.J. Brown and his leadership on and off the field.
Some guys just don’t care about records. They don’t pay attention, they couldn’t tell you who they’re chasing, they just don’t want to be bothered.
Not Saquon.
Saquon Barkley loves to study the NFL and the game’s history, and he has since he was a kid growing up in the Allentown-Bethlehem area. He knew exactly how many rushing yards LeSean McCoy had when he set the Eagles record in 2013 and he knows exactly how many rushing yards Eric Dickerson had when he set the NFL record in 1984.
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He doesn’t hide from it. He wants to break records.
“I feel like you want to be great, you've got to be able to study the greats and learn from them,” Barkley said at his locker Thursday. “So I try to focus, especially in my position, on the history of the position and learning the position and watching those guys and seeing the stuff that they were able to accomplish and as a competitor try to go out there and go get them.”
Barkley is up to 1,623 rushing yards with four regular-season games left in his first season with the Eagles. Dickerson rushed for 2,105 yards in 16 games with the Rams in 1984, his second NFL season. So Barkley needs 483 yards – or 121 per game – to break Dickerson’s record.
Although the Eagles face the Steelers and their 4th-ranked run defense Sunday, their final three games are against the Commanders, Cowboys and Giants, who rank 28th, 30th and 29th in rushing yards allowed, each allowing between 137 and 142 yards per game.
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He really could do this.
“I know a lot about Eric Dickerson,” Barkley said. “I know that he has the record. He's (had it) for 40 years. Obviously, I've heard the talk. I know the number. I know what it's going to take to get it.
“Kind of messed around with it, with the emotions of how I feel for it, but the mindset is don't be scared of it, embrace it. It's there. Challenge yourself to try to go get it. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is winning football games.”
With one huge game in the next three, Barkley could give himself an opportunity to break Dickerson’s mark before the season finale against the Giants, his former team, which could allow Nick Sirianni to shut him down a week early if the Eagles are locked into their playoff seed. He would need to average 161 yards against the Steelers, Commanders and Cowboys to get the record in 16 games.
If Barkley doesn’t have the record by the Cowboys game and the Eagles don’t have anything to play for, Sirianni will have a tough call whether to play him against his former team and chase the record or shut him down to make sure he’s healthy. Will probably depend on how close he is to 2,105 and what Barkley wants to do.
It is important to note that the single-season record for rushing yards per game belongs to O.J. Simpson, who averaged 143.1 yards with the Bills in 1973. That’s 2,003 yards in 14 games. Dickerson ran for 2,105 in 16 games – that’s 131.6 yards per game – but Jim Brown in 1963 (133.1) and Walter Payton in 1977 (132.3) also had higher per-game averages than Dickerson.
Barkley said he began studying the great running backs and their accomplishments as a kid, and he loves talking about the NFL’s history and plans to do more of it after he retires.
“I used to more growing up - you don't really have that much time when you're here - but I want to be on TV,” he said. “I want to do something kind of similar to what (Michael) Strahan does. Half of my job talking about football, half of it talking about other stuff in life. That's kind of where it stems from.”
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