There is another universe, parallel to our own but different in many ways, where legions of fans are emotionally invested in the career and fate of Saquon Barkley.
The Bifrost to this realm is Paterson-Plank Road in North Jersey, which was named after two quantum physicists because it is actually a Mobius strip winding through non-Euclidian space. (I drove straight on it for an hour once and somehow passed MetLife Stadium four times). Midday WFAN callers send daily signals through the wormhole from this strange mirrorverse where Daniel Jones has a goatee and I do not. Giants bloggers have learned how to puncture the permeable membrane between worlds, mining the Saquonverse for clicks and shares on mysterious social networks which are entirely different from our own, including one called “Facebook.”
Here in the 616, Barkley is just another free agent running back coming off a season where he averaged 3.9 yards per carry for a dreadful team. He’s destined to sign a two-year, $12-million contract with the Buccaneers or Bears, rush for about 660 yards in 2024 (seven touchdowns, 40-223-2 as a receiver) then go the way of Todd Gurley or Dalvin Cook. Over in the Saquonverse, however, NFL football has not changed since 1985, Barkley is Eric Dickerson, and fans are on the edges of their seats wondering when the New York Giants will sign him for six years at $80-million and erect a statue in the parking lot in his honor.
Welcome to the Too Deep Zone Offseason Nonsense Preview, where I inoculate you against seven months of shrill and mostly meaningless Hot Stove League chatter by giving you a stiff dose of the NFL’s dumbest unfolding dramas. We’ll do this countdown style, because countdowns rule.
10. Enter the Saquonverse
The Giants franchise-tagged Barkley in 2023 because the running back tag was relatively cheap ($10.1 million) and they did not have any better ideas. Barkley finished the season with negative-47 rushing DYAR and 45 receiving DYAR: he was an almost perfectly replacement-level running back. There is merit to the argument that the dreadful Giants offensive line and passing game impacted Barkley’s metrics, but the whole point of paying a veteran running back $10.1 million is getting someone who can overcome offensive line and passing game deficiencies.
Ah, but Barkley is the most beloved character in the Giants organization, despite Tommy DeVito’s best efforts to unseat him through the awesome power of Sopranos cosplay. Barkley is just about the only Giants name who clicks, which would be a huge problem for the sprawling Giants press pool if not for the Saquonverse.
Meanwhile, in Giants news that might have some bearing on the 2024 standings, Brian Daboll’s coaching staff was so dysfunctional by the end of last season that they made the Eagles staff look like the crew of the Enterprise-D: Daboll and defensive coordinator Wink Martindale playing power games; Daboll and offensive coordinator Mike Kafka playing tug-of-war over playcalling duties, etc. Daboll fired a chunk of Martindale’s staff, Wink left in a huff, and Kafka flirted with the Seahawks before accepting a conciliatory “assistant head coach” title which will come in handy when Daboll, who received too much adulation too quickly in 2022, is fired next December.
Oh, and Daniel Jones is not only recovering from an ACL tear but got upstaged in 2023 by a kid playing Nathan Detroit in a high school production of Guys and Dolls.
All of that stuff is messy, confusing and depressing. Most of it doesn’t click, because no one has Wink Martendale on their fantasy team. So it’s Saquon Saquon Saquon. And when he is gone, heaven help Giants media members, who will lose their collective minds if forced to speculate weekly about Kayvon Thibodeaux.
9. Pickett’s Blarg
Kenny Pickett is Carson Wentz with 10% more intestinal fortitude but 50% less talent. After his poor response to his late-season demotion, the Steelers should drive him up to Forest County and leave him by the side of Route 62 to fend for himself. But the Steelers cannot make any decisions without offering a sacrifice of pierogies and Iron City Light before a shrine devoted to the Super Bowl IX champions. The team is essentially run by an ancestral cult of Jack Lambert worshippers. And Pickett, though he is as Jersey as Tommy DeVito, is an adopted hometown hero.
Steelers president Art Rooney II’s “not closing the door on a trade” for a veteran quarterback remarks made headlines last week. Rooney was far more charitable, however, in his appraisal of Pickett when you read beyond the pull quotes. “I think he sure showed himself to be a winner. He showed somebody that can bring a team back from behind late in a game. So, a lot of positives from Kenny in the first two seasons, and we just need to see him take the next step.”
The next step, Rooney admitted, is scoring more points. In other words: the first step. But rhetorically, Rooney is where Mike Tomlin was for much of the season: we like entering the fourth quarter trailing 16-13 to the Titans. Tomlin will spend minicamps and training camp scowling at the (tiny) Steelers press pool when they dare to ask about the quarterback situation. Given little else to work with, reporters will fall back on stories about Pickett’s “growth” and “maturity,” the kind that neither get them called into coach’s offense nor generate angry letters from University of Pittsburgh alums.
The Steelers love the 1970s so much that they are going to reenact a 70s style Eric Hipple-versus-Gary Danielson quarterback controversy between Pickett, Mason Rudolph and whatever Jacoby Brissett-caliber newcomer replaces the freshly-released Mitch Trubisky, the kind that lasts three years and results in a triple TKO. Either that or new coordinator Arthur Smith will dream up a new Single Wing-type offense in which two or three quarterbacks are on the field at the same time, with Diontae Johnson doing all of the passing.
8. Old Free Agents Never Die
Free agency will be fun this year! There’s Kirk Cousins. And low cost/risk alternative Baker Mayfield. There are blue chips like Chris Jones, Mike Evans, Tee Higgins and D.J. Reader, some of whom are likely to change teams, plus lots of intriguing young edge rushers like Bryce Huff and Jaguars Josh Allen.
Much of the free agent chatter, however, will revolve around:
Derrick Henry, who is more than ready for his Franco Harris-with-the-Seahawks season;
Odell Beckham, a Cheshire Cat who has slowly disappeared, leaving only his reputation and earning power;
Saquon Barkley, mentioned earlier;
Josh Jacobs, Saquon with less star power;
Tony Pollard and Austin Ekeler, whose presence will glut the veteran running back market, meaning somebody famous is going to be hanging around the transaction wire until August;
Michael Thomas, who has grown so injury prone and toxic that even the Saints cannot justify paying him anymore;
Really really old defensive players like Bobby Wagner, Lavonte David, Calais Campbell and Fletcher Cox, all of whom will be linked with the Lions and Texans (rising contenders with money to spend/waste on “veteran leadership.”)
Randy Gregory, a career bit player with whom the NFL Internet is obsessed for some reason. (Big name. Sympathy-inspiring story. Excellent agent).
Huff may be the most interesting player on the market. He’s a rotation pass rusher who put up remarkable numbers for the Jets in limited action: 60 pressures in just 328 pass snaps, per Sports Info Solutions. While Huff is a legitimate up-and-comer, he will also be catnip for analysts eager to prove how much homework they did: by the time your favorite film grinder is done explaining how he appreciates Huff on deeper levels than your second-favorite film grinder, Huff will be Reggie White, and the team that signs him will be a lock for the Super Bowl.
7. Harbaugh Nation
Jim Harbaugh will be the superstar of the scouting combine in a few weeks, where he will grant his first press conference to the national media. Harbaugh loves negging the press, and we love getting treated like grub worms in exchange for those sweet, sweet pull quotes.
There’s a disconnect between what casual fans think of the 2024 Chargers – Harbaugh + Justin Herbert = instantaneous awesomeness – and what anyone with a cursory understanding of the salary cap and the state of the team’s roster thinks of the Chargers. They need a floor-to-rafters rebuild around Herbert, who himself may not be the load-bearing column of excellence he was prematurely anointed as.
Whatever Dean Spanos may have communicated during interviews, Harbaugh clearly envisions both a one-year grace period ahead of him and a carte blanche with his coaching staff: hence the arrival of Greg Roman, the man who placed restrictor plates on Lamar Jackson for several years, and former Michigan defensive coordinator Jesse Minter, who no longer gets to start the season against Bowling Green and UNLV.
I don’t hate the Ravens-lite staff and front office the Chargers are building, mind you, though it sure looks like Harbaugh’s Linkedin network consists solely of his brother. It’s just that Harbaugh’s arrival is going to generate lots of chatter and tea-leaf reading about a team that won’t deserve any real attention until at least 2025.
6. Eagles, Interrupted
The Eagles’ up-and-down fortunes over the last decade have not been healthy for Philly fans, who were not renowned for their (our) emotional stability in the first place. If the Eagles merely stunk, the would get some grudging sympathy from the Phaithful. But their saw-toothed wave of Super Bowl runs and precipitous collapses, both sometimes happening within a six-week span, has left Eagles fans skeptical of all success and indignant about every failure. Trust me: many Eagles fans were only truly happy for about eight hours after Super Bowl LII; they brushed their teeth the next morning thinking, “How do we resolve this Carson Wentz/Nick Foles situation?”
OK, I’m exaggerating. Those fans were happy again during Jason Kelce’s parade speech. But you get the idea: in the dark recesses of our damaged psyches, many Eagles fans relish an Eagles collapse more than they would a Cowboys collapse. And this offseason will offer a lot of opportunities for penitential self-flagellation.
Haason Reddick, a hometown hero who should be revered like Clyde Simmons, received permission to seek a trade, even though he claims he never asked for it. (It has felt for months like everyone in the Eagles organization is going out of their way to purposely miscommunicate at this point. At presstime, Kelce’s retirement murmurings had progressed to the “talking to television networks” stage. A.J. Brown was making inane social media remarks during the Super Bowl instead of playing in it; Brown is gearing up for a full-throttle diva year, and neither dealing with the pending headaches nor trading him to avoid them looks like an appealing option (unless Howie Roseman has another heist up his sleeve). Early reviews on the coordinator swap boil down to Vic Fangio good/Kellen Moore meh, and Moore’s arrival has been interpreted (perhaps rightly) as a demotion for Nick Sirianni from “head coach/offensive innovator,” to “functionary/figurehead.”
There’s plenty of real intrigue underlying the Eagles drama. But the whole affair is going to be recast as a morality play, with Jeffrey Lurie, Sirianni, Roseman (inevitably) and Jalen Hurts (probably, sadly) cast as the villains. Kelce isn’t retiring because he’s already a Hall of Famer and can command seven figures in a television studio: he’s fleeing dysfunction! Brown isn’t a star receiver like any other: he’s mad at Sirianni and has fallen out with Hurts! Fletcher Cox won’t leave because he’s a holdover from the Andy Reid era who helped win a Super Bowl six years ago and the time has come: he’s Brian Dawkins 2.0, about to take the very concept of leadership with him when he goes!
Meanwhile, the Bills will lose even more key players than the Eagles this offseason, but BillsMafia will host a table-obliterating party if the team drafts a hard-hitting safety.
5. Jerrah! Jerrah! Jerrah!
The Cowboys would rank higher if they weren’t such a delightful guilty-pleasure soap opera. Seriously: interviewing Rex Ryan for defensive coordinator? During Super Bowl week? That’s like Snooki showing up at Super Bowl Opening Night to make a pass at Travis Kelce before spilling a frozen margarita down her own cleavage. Jerry Jones would rather score an own goal in an effort to upstage the Super Bowl than do something quietly normal.
Ryan aside, the Cowboys don’t have any fresh storylines in the works this offseason, merely variations on popular themes.
Dak Prescott is due for an extension. Where has the time gone? It feels like only yesterday when I interviewed him in the long and overdramatic runup to his first contract extension. Jones could solve this problem at any time – Prescott’s market value is set around four years and a notch above $200-million; Jones has no better options unless you are still holding out hope for Trey Lance – but Jerrah will whine, moan and try to hide his broccoli under his mashed potatoes for weeks, effectively negotiating against himself until he breaks the piggy bank sometime in July.
Jones’ relationship with Mike McCarthy is also just a familiar riff on his perpetual dissatisfaction with Jason Garrett and Wade Phillips. Jerrah never likes his coaches very much but hates breaking a new one in. As lovers behind the parlor curtain go, Bill Belichick is an odd choice, but far be it from me to yuk Jerrah’s yum.
As for subplots, Micah Parsons is due for an extension, and Tony Pollard is a free agent coming off a tag year. Jones will probably splurge for Parsons, because sacks are sexy, but he may also use the Parsons extension as an excuse to cry poor about Prescott. Pollard is weak tea Saquon, but Jerrah has been hobby-horsing about running backs since the days of Marion Barber and Julius Jones, so he’ll make the Pollard situation into a bigger deal than it should be.
All of the intrigue and SEO-friendly rumor-mongering will end with a 2024 Cowboys team and coaching staff which does not look much different than the 2023 staff. The Cowboys are genre fiction with static characters. That’s one of the things that makes them so endearing: if they ever experienced real growth, they would not be the Cowboys anymore.
4. Tua Much Money
Tua Tagovailoa had a fine 2023 season from a yards/touchdowns/wins standpoint and a disastrous season from a cost-benefit analysis standpoint. With Tagovailoa playing on the fourth year of his rookie contract, after peers Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert and Jalen Hurts got their $250-plus million paydays, the Dolphins needed Tua to either:
Play so well that he silenced any skepticism about his reliance on Tyreek Hill and Mike McDaniel’s dipsy-doodle offense; or
Backslide Baker Mayfield-style, making it easy for the team to jettison him in favor of something splashy/stupid like a Russel Wilson trade.
Tagovailoa took the fork in the road: big stats, huge wins over marshmallows, tiny performances against better opponents and in critical late-season games. It’s hard to rank him anywhere but fourth among the quarterbacks listed a moment ago, but the conventions of NFL contract structure dictate that he must come first. (A Trevor Lawrence extension could drive Tua’s compensation up further). A clever organization and general manager could thread this needle by offering Tua a $280-million looking contract that deflates to around three years at $160-million without the helium. Dolphins GM Chris Grier is stuck dealing with owner Stephen Ross, who may lowball Tua while trying to lure Tom Brady out of retirement again.
Few sportstalk personalities have even a rudimentary understanding of the salary cap or contract structures. Furthermore, most Tagovailoa discussions get dragged immediately through the gates of he’s a system quarterback hell. Brace for months of “Tagovailoa does/doesn’t deserve the money” takes based on specious reasoning, misunderstanding of basic facts and the simplistic reasoning that a $250-plus million contract is something “deserves” like extra ice cream for dessert after doing all their chores, as opposed to a crucial turning point in an organization’s history and quarterback’s career.
3. All-American Cousins
Kirk Cousins’ free agency is a legitimately huge NFL story. Cousins himself, meanwhile, remains an enduring symbol of the perils of comfortable complacency and suffocating adequacy. The best argument for the Vikings re-signing him is that they did not position themselves for a better alternative, which is the worst possible argument for inaction in any endeavor, though a common one.
Vikings fans appear to be taking the fatalist Russian peasant approach to Cousins: like winter, he will return, bringing a hardship which has at least grown manageable and familiar. NFL insiders keep signaling that Cousins will return to the Vikings, which may be a mix of idle gossip (general managers guess each other’s moves about as well as we do), an effort to drive the Cousins market down and a general NFL-wide crisis of imagination now entering its sixth decade.
Speaking of the Cousins market: one reason it's tempting to predict a return to the Vikings is that it’s hard to identify a potential suitor. The Patriots, perhaps? The Falcons? Raiders? Giants? There aren’t many teams out there with the right combination of cap space to burn, enough talent to feasibly benefit from the twilight of Cousins’ career and the lack of good sense to squander the former in pursuit of the latter.
The highlight of the Cousins Spring will be general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah’s remarks at the scouting combine. Every time Adofo-Mensah speaks on the record about Cousins he ends up sounding like a cross between a charming young prob-stat professor on his fourth martini and the Silver Surfer contemplating the cosmos in narration panels. My guess is that Adofo-Mensah’s remarks about Cousins will sound like verification that he is re-signing the quarterback in the pull-quotes but a farewell blessing to anyone who hears the full statement and/or has enough of a STEM background to hatchet through the GM’s nested logic statements.
2. Strawmanning Fields Forever
The Bears will probably select Caleb Williams with the top pick in the draft. Justin Fields probably won’t fetch much on the trade market: a Sam Darnold haul on the high end (second and fourth rounders, plus change), a Trey Lance haul on the low end (one fourth-round pick).
Ah, but nonsense thrives in a world of multiple “probably’s.” Uncertainty spawns silly listicles (Five Landing Spots for Justin Fields, Including the Cowboys, Because This Writer Sacrificed All Credibility and Dignity Long Ago) and Jackson Pollock splatter-painted mock-draft abstractions (In my latest mock, the STEELERS trade all the way up to #1, while the Bears select nine times in the first round).
Sometime in the next three weeks, we will learn that Fields’ camp has been given permission to pursue a trade. At that very moment, every local reporter will be obligated to write a “Will [Home Team] Trade for Justin Fields” article, no matter how ludicrous the scenario. By “obligated,” I mean that many will receive emails from their editors. Others won’t need to be prompted: our industry is choking itself on empty-calorie keyword-driven content, but those who stop churning it out might as well start driving DoorDash. Fields comes with an almost stratospheric searchability-to-performance quotient (i.e. he’s much more popular than good), and the Bears have those two first-round picks to fiddle around with, making the whole Fields situation a honeypot of idle speculation.
At least Fields still has some trade value. There are surely Patriots and Jets fans/bloggers wondering if their favorite teams will net two first-round picks for Mac Jones and Zach Wilson or settle for one.
1.He Who Must Not Be Named
Sort-of deplatforming Aaron Rodgers sort-of worked.
Rodgers was not officially suspended by ESPN and the Pat McAfee podcast after his feud with Jimmy Kimmel took a turn for the slanderous: Rodgers and McAfee, the two coolest middle schoolers in the cafeteria, need everyone to know that the principal was too lame to punish them. But their we always planned for Rodgers to take an offseason break story is obvious spin. Television executives and advertisers were skittish, so Rodgers and McAfee got the Ned Beatty Network speech.
When the Jets season ended, meanwhile, Rodgers lost the ability to strut and fret upon the sideline, fielding a softball question or two from a rightsholder’s reporter who was sure to toe the line. Rodgers could have peacocked onto Media Row during Super Bowl week and gotten all the attention he craves, of course, but that would have entailed exposure to the actual media in all our greasy, noncompliant glory. Rodgers needs a buffer, the rest of us need Bufferin.
Rodgers’ media silence left a void which Jets owner Woody Johnson merrily filled last week by placing Robert Saleh, general manager Joe Douglas and even backup quarterback Zach Wilson on notice. Meanwhile, a 2023 Jets autopsy by friends of the Zone Diana Russini and Zach Rosenblatt in The Athletic offered some unsurprising tales of the relationship among Saleh, Douglass, Rodgers and his therapy pet Nathaniel Hackett. Rodgers had a direct line to Douglas to pitch his personnel ideas (see Randall Cobb, Billy Turner, etc., etc.) Saleh kept his hands off the offense. Hackett kept his hands off Rodgers, then lapsed into a sort of Ask Madden mode when Rodgers was gone. As for game days:
“In Week 6, Rodgers started flying in from California for games and was an active voice on the sideline headsets, offering opinions and ideas along with Hackett and the other offensive coaches before flying back to California the next day. The offense struggled nonetheless.”
Nonetheless does amazing work at the end of that paragraph.
Rodgers Szn will soon ramp up. McAfee will need guests. Saleh and/or Douglas will likely speak at the combine. Rodgers won’t be able to resist either making a public pitch for free agents, explaining how he recovered from an Achilles injury in record time (he totally could have returned in December) by ignoring science or just insisting that the woke mob cannot keep him off the airwaves with their you cannot publicly accuse someone of unspeakable crimes because they told a joke about you once cancel culture. And Rodgers will be back on the field by training camp at the latest, meaning we will be force-fed a “comeback” storyline that even Jets fans will find hard to swallow after the hornswoggle of 2023.
So enjoy the relative silence, because Mount Ayahuasca will erupt any day now.
“…fatalist Russian peasant approach to Cousins: like winter, he will return, bringing a hardship which has at least grown manageable and familiar. “. This is why I’m here! And It’s great to read you freed from the shackles of SEO and click bait!
Awesome. Long form is where its at.