Eagles

It’s Great to Hear the Words “Play Action” with Saquon Barkley, Who Has a Flexible Eagles Contract

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Mar 13th, 2024 · 11:55 AM EDT

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Let’s take a closer look at the Saquon contract, courtesy of the person who sent this to Albert Breer:

Eagles RB Saquon Barkley’s three-year, $37.75 million deal.

• $11.625 million signing bonus.
• $25.5 million fully guaranteed.
• $24.5 million over first 2 years.
• $1.5 million of 2026 base ($12M) guaranteed.

Essentially a two-year deal, with a team option for ’26.

— Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) March 13, 2024

It’s a typical Howie structure that gives the Eagles a potential out after 2025. If they decide to move on from Saquon after two seasons, they’d eat about $8.4 million in dead cap, which isn’t very much in today’s NFL. For context, they’ve got a little less than $40 million to go through from the Jason Kelce and Fletcher Cox retirements and they’re taking on about $7 million in dead cap this season for Avonte Maddox alone. That’s always the case. Last year they had dead cap for Javon Hargrave and Brandon Brooks and in 2022 they ate $9 million on Malik Jackson.

The other thing about Saquon is that his cap hits are spread out this way, according to Spotrac and Over the Cap:

• 2024: $3.9 million
• 2025: $13.5 million
• 2026: $15.5 million

The Eagles probably are not going into 2026 with a $15.5 million cap hit for Saquon. If he makes it that far he’s probably getting the restructure treatment that everyone gets. They’ll lower that 2026 cap number and do their void/dummy year routine.

Also this should be shared, it’s James Palmer saying Saquon was a scheme fit:

Moments after the new broke that the #Eagles are signing versatile DB Chauncey Gardner-Johnson. What I know about the signing and why Saquon Barkley was such a good fit. pic.twitter.com/E0fGEKXH1q

— James Palmer (@JamesPalmerTV) March 12, 2024

Very nice to hear “play action” in there. They were not a play action team over the past two seasons, or, more specifically, they did a lot of their deception in the option game, working out of the shotgun.

A couple of key 2023 Eagles statistics, via Sport Radar, that you might want to use at the water cooler if you’re talking about this over the next couple of weeks or months:

• play action percentage: 8.5% (27th)
• play action + RPO percentage: 24.6% (tied for 1st)
• under center percentage: 7% (dead last)
• shotgun percentage: 86.7% (1st)

The numbers confirm what you already knew. They weren’t lining up Jalen Hurts under center, but they’d hold the linebacker or defensive end with their pull/read game instead. That was their play action functioning almost exclusively out of the shotgun, so it illustrates how drastic of a change it might be with Kellen Moore running the offsense.

And the more I hear about the Barkley addition, the more it sounds like Moore is fully in control, with those Sirianni and Shane Steichen concepts taking a back seat. It’ll be curious to see how much of the 2022 and 2023 offense remains in the playbook. Hopefully the bubble screen and four verticals go “straight to hell,” as Maxine Waters once said.

editor’s note: an earlier version of this post said “Jesse Palmer” instead of “James Palmer.” Jesse is the college football analyst and former Florida quarterback. I suck.