One of the biggest storylines from free agency was Saquon Barkley departing the New York Giants for their NFC East rivals, the Philadelphia Eagles.
While Barkley’s move to the Eagles was shocking, it was less surprising to see him leave the Giants after the two sides failed to reach a contract extension for quite some time. Even though Barkley’s departure from New York was expected, Giants owner John Mara admitted that they refused to trade him during his contract year on the franchise tag.
John Mara Admits the Giants Were Uninterested in Trading Saquon Barkley Last Season
Hindsight is always 20-20, it doesn’t matter the line of work you’re in. When things happen you can always think about what could have been if you made a different choice. Mara is no different as he reflects on Barkley and the trade that wasn’t last season.
“I hate trading guys right at the trade deadline because it almost signals that you’re giving up on the season,” Mara said this week at the NFL‘s Annual League Meeting, via the New York Daily News. “And Saquon, I was still hoping to be able to sign him at some point. It’s unfortunate we weren’t able to do it.”
General Manager Joe Schoen doubled down on the owner’s sentiment and agreed that trading Barkley would’ve felt like a waving of the white flag on the season — a move they were not willing to do.
“(Barkley) was one of our better offensive players, and we weren’t giving up,” Schoen said. “We still wanted him to go out there and perform for us . . . When (Daniel Jones) was coming back from the neck injury, we wanted to make sure they could go out there and operate. I think Saquon was a big part of that at that time.”
The hard part about letting your star players reach free agency is that a lot of what happens next is out of your control. It’s something that Mara acknowledged when he discussed how everything unfolded between the team and Barkley throughout the year leading to this point.
“That was kind of an ongoing discussion through the year that it could come to this, and they knew my feelings that I was hoping it didn’t come to this,” Mara said. “But at the end of the day, I know sometimes, every once in a while, I read, ‘Oh, he’s meddling, he’s meddling.’ No. We’ve run our organization the same way for many, many years.”
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Despite the Giants’ unwillingness to move on from Barkley, they did, however, move on from another one of their star players in DL Leonard Williams. Several factors go into why a team does what they do, but the idea of trading Williams but not Barkley with both of them set to hit free agency after the season seems to be a head-scratcher.
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