If Saquon Barkley hypothetically chose to retire after last season, I hypothetically wouldn’t blame him, and I hypothetically wouldn’t be mad at him. If he wanted to come in like a lightning bolt, break the season, and dip out, that’s hypothetically fine. That’s not what happened though. We’re going to get more years of King-Quan in the Philadelphia Eagles offense, and that actually rocks.
Barkley was on Chris Long’s aptly named podcast, Green Light with Chris Long, and he was asked about what his retirement might look like. Was he going to go out on top, or run his treads down to nothing? Barkley said he’ll probably just surprise people and skedaddle out of nowhere.
The Barry Sanders approach to retirement
The Eagles who have retired recently, haven’t exactly beat around the bush with it. Jason Kelce was thinking about retirement before the 2022 season, and then again before the 2023 season. We all kind of knew that it was coming at some point. Brandon Graham went out and said that the 2024 season was going to be his farewell tour, but to be fair, his injury made that situation foggy.
This franchise hasn’t had a whole lot of guys who have ended their careers with blindsiding retirements, which is pretty nice. When that happens, it can put a franchise in a tough spot.
When Andrew Luck retired two weeks before the start of the 2019 season, it put that franchise into a spiral that they haven’t gotten out of yet. On the other side of things, when Aaron Donald retired last offseason, the Rams didn’t really miss a step.
The most famous retirement like this was probably Barry Sanders’. He played 10 seasons, never rushed for under 1,000 yards, was an All-Pro running back every single year, and then retired the day before the Lions started their training camp for the 1999 season. He went out on top and was healthy when he did it.
Chris Long’s last question to Barkley on the podcast was, “Do you want to be like Aaron Donald, where AD says, ‘Hey, I want to get out of here playing at the highest level’? Or do you imagine yourself as one of these guys that wants to do it until the wheels fall off?”
Barkley said, “I’ll probably be one of those guys that it’ll be out of nowhere. Like, I’ll probably just wake up one day, whether it’s next year, or two years, or four years, and be like, ‘It’s over.’ I don’t think I will ever lose that passion… The competitive nature is always going to be there… One of my favorite players of all time is Barry Sanders, so probably similar to that.”
When Sanders retired, it was a little wonky because a couple of years earlier, he signed a six-year extension. So people were a little mad at him for that. Yes, Saquon did sign an extension, so there's a possibility that his retirement might not fall in line with the end of a contract, but there are some differences between Barkley and Sanders.
For one, Saquon won a Super Bowl, and not only did he win a Super Bowl, but he was the focus of the offense on the Eagles' Super Bowl run. It’s not like he was just putzing around on a Super Bowl offense. While Sanders is the best running back in the history of football, he never reached the highest of highs, team-wise. When he retired, the entirety of the Lions and their fans were like, ‘Wait… What the hell are we supposed to do now? He was the chosen one. This sucks.’
Second, Sanders was a homegrown player for the Lions. As a professional, all he ever knew was Detroit. Barkley gave the Giants a chance, but they fumbled it. So he went to a franchise that appreciates him. To me, it still doesn’t even feel real that he’s an Eagle; it’s one of those things that feels too good to be true.
It’ll definitely stink when Saquon does retire, but that hopefully won’t be for a couple of years. Yeah, he said, “...whether it’s next year,” but that feels more like he doesn’t know when it’ll happen rather than him making a prediction…
…Or that could just be wishful thinking as a football romantic.