How Close Is Saquon Barkley to Breaking the NFL Single-Season Rushing Record? Comparing Eagles RB’s Year To Eric Dickerson’s Historic Season

Saquon Barkley’s debut season with the Philadelphia Eagles has exceeded all reasonable expectations. With two games remaining, Barkley is threatening Eric Dickerson’s single-season rushing record set in 1984.

How many yards does Barkley need to break the record? Has Barkley had a better season than Dickerson’s 1984 campaign? It’s not easy to compare eras, but let’s do our best to analyze two of the greatest running back seasons ever.

How Many Yards Does Saquon Barkley Need to Break Eric Dickerson’s Record?

Barkley needs 268 yards (134 per game) to break Dickerson’s 40-year-old mark of 2,105 yards. He has averaged 120.5 yards per game this season, so it will take some above-average performances to get there, but it’s certainly possible.

You don’t have to remind Barkley, though. He knows all about the record and how many yards he is away from breaking it.

“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.”

The single-season rushing record is a goal that Barkley and the Eagles’ offensive line have set for themselves. Barkley said he has studied Dickerson’s game and wants to mimic the former back.

“I feel like you want to be great, you’ve got to be able to study the greats and learn from them,” Barkley said. “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 has a chance to set the record against his former team, the New York Giants, in Week 18. In October, he torched the Giants for 176 yards in just three quarters of action.

Barkley vs. Dickerson: Comparing The Numbers

First, it’s worth simply laying out the raw stats between 2024 Barkley and 1984 Dickerson. Obviously, advanced metrics such as yards over expected and yards after contact weren’t available in the 80s, so we’ll stick to standard stats when comparing the two.

Barkley has the slight edge in scrimmage yards per game due to the increased value of running backs in the passing game compared to Dickerson’s era. While Dickerson has the slight edge in total volume per game, Barkley’s volume is extremely impressive given the more even distribution of running back touches in the present era.

Regardless, we can show how rare it is for both these players to handle a high level of volume while also being efficient. In the Super Bowl era, there have been 466 seasons where a player averaged at least 20 touches per game. Out of those seasons, Barkley has the ninth-highest yards per touch (6.1). Dickerson’s 1984 season ranks 48th on that list.

It’s not just because Barkley is more involved in the passing game, as he’s also averaging 5.9 yards per carry compared to 5.6 for Dickerson. Of course, Saquon’s usage as a legitimate receiving threat increases his lead in efficiency too, as he’s averaged 8.9 yards per catch compared to 6.6 for Dickerson.

Who Carried His Team More?

Player production isn’t just a product of the player’s talent. Coaching and supporting cast impact a player’s bottom-line statistics too, as Barkley can attest to based on his tenure with the New York Giants.

The 1984 Rams were a 10-6 squad, but their offense was heavily reliant on Dickerson. Los Angeles was only 12th in points per game even with Dickerson’s record-breaking season. Wide receiver Henry Ellard was First Team All-Pro, but as a punt returner (he led the Rams with 622 receiving yards, which only ranked 52nd in the NFL).

By contrast, the Eagles boast a pair of Pro-Bowl-level wide receivers in A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith, an above-average receiving tight end in Dallas Goedert, and one of the best short-yardage runners ever in Jalen Hurts. Not all those ingredients have been healthy this season, but the 2024 Eagles have more options beyond their superstar running back than the 1984 Rams did.

As a result, Dickerson accounted for 44.8% of the Rams’ total yards, while Barkley has accounted for 38.0% of the Eagles’ total yards this year. Saquon has the highest share of any player in 2024, but Dickerson’s is the eighth-highest in the Super Bowl era. By contrast, Barkley’s share ranks 63rd-highest.

Dickerson’s share is also impressive when you consider that his contributions came for a playoff team, something only two other players ahead of him on this list – 2003 Jamal Lewis and 1977 Walter Payton – can say.

Who Had the Better Era-Adjusted Rushing Season?

So Barkley has had the more efficient season, while Dickerson carried a heavier share of his team’s offensive workload. But comparing numbers across eras isn’t an apples-to-apples exercise, particularly given how much more prominent the passing game is today compared to when Dickerson played.

Z-scores are one way to control for this. In statistics, Z-scores measure how many standard deviations above or below a value is from the average. In this case, we can see whether Barkley or Dickerson was more impressive relative to their peers by:

Gathering the rushing leader on every team in the Super Bowl era, then
Calculating the Z-score for each season to see how Barkley and Dickerson compare to the other rushing leaders that season.

When we go through all that, we see just how tight things are between Barkley and Dickerson. Both are among the 13 best rushing seasons in the Super Bowl era, but Barkley holds the very slight edge over Dickerson with two weeks left.

Barkley has nearly doubled the averaging rushing leader entering Week 17, putting him roughly three standard deviations above the average rushing leader. And while Dickerson’s raw total is more impressive, the average rushing leader in 1984 ran for nearly 1,000 yards, bringing down Dickerson when you compare him to his peers that season.

As a result, Barkley comes in with the eighth-best era-adjusted season in the Super Bowl era, while Dickerson is just behind at 13th. Interestingly, Barkley will have a hard time catching recent seasons from Derrick Henry (2020) and Jonathan Taylor (2021), who excelled in depressed rushing environments.

No matter how you slice it, Barkley’s season is one of the greatest rushing seasons ever, regardless of whether he catches Dickerson. But even if he falls short of the 40-year record, Barkley can claim that he was both more efficient and posted more impressive production relative to his era.

Dickerson Weighs In On Barkley’s Pursuit Of His Record

With Barkley nipping at his heels, Dickerson weighed in on whether he thinks the Eagles superstar will surpass him, and he was quite candid.

“I don’t think he’ll break it,” Dickerson told the Los Angeles Times. “But if he breaks it, he breaks it. Do I want him to break it? Absolutely not. I don’t pull no punches on that. But I’m not whining about it. He had 17 games to do it? Hey, football is football. That’s the way I look at it. If he’s fortunate to get over 2,000 yards and get the record, it’s a great record to have.”

When asked how he feels about Barkley having an extra game to surpass 2,105 yards, Dickerson pointed out that he also had an additional contest over the previous record-holder.

“O.J. Simpson was my favorite player. He went over 2,000 yards in 14 games. It took me 15 games to get to 2,000. I had one extra game to play,” Dickerson said. “Getting to 2,000 is an accomplishment in itself. I got close to that three other times.”

Dickerson said that he doesn’t typically watch NFL games, but he’ll be tuning in to see if Barkley breaks his record.

“I don’t sit down and watch games, except the Rams, and I work for the team. But I’ll have no choice but to keep up with it because I get so many text messages,” he said. “People blowing up my phone like, ‘Man, it’s not fair. He gets 17 games,’ or, ‘We’re going to put a hex on him.'”

Dickerson also shared his thoughts on Barkley as a player.

“I like him,” Dickerson said. “But I tend to like big backs. He’s not a big back like I was. He’s elusive, he’s tough, he runs hard, he can catch the ball out of the backfield. I think he’s a great player.

“I always felt like he’d never reach his potential when he was in New York. You could take Emmitt Smith and put him in Cleveland, and he’d have never been the Emmitt Smith we know now. …  Even myself. If you’d have put me in Cincinnati on a bad team, I’d have never been that guy. Because these bad football teams with no blocking, I don’t care how great you are. If you don’t have the guys in front of you, you can’t do it.”

On Sunday, Barkley will face the Dallas Cowboys. While the Cowboys are allowing the sixth-most rushing yards per game (135.9), they held Barkley to just 66 yards on 14 carries in their first meeting in November.

With that said, he still averaged 4.7 yards per carry, and the Eagles totaled 187 yards on the ground because they opted to use multiple backs in the 34-6 victory.