NFL Free Agency 2024: The Market for Saquon Barkley, Other RBs

A below-average draft class could help him, along with Josh Jacobs, Tony Pollard, Derrick Henry, D’Andre Swift and Austin Ekeler.

One Monday and Tuesday, NFL teams can negotiate with unrestricted free agents during the legal-tampering period, and on Wednesday there should be a flurry of signings when free agency kicks off at 4 p.m. ET. It’s time to go shopping!

• The New York Giants’ decision to not tag Saquon Barkley at $12.1 million for 2024 does make some sense. Doing so and not giving him the long-term deal he wants would probably lead to another contract squabble. He’s also going into his seventh year as a running back and has a significant injury history.

So there’s some logic to the decision here.

What I’m more interested to see is how other teams view him.

Clearly, he’s still the talent he was coming out of Penn State in 2018—a bigger back with the ability to break big plays and be a real threat in the pass game. And someone will value that, especially with a below-average class coming out at the position in the NFL draft, and plenty of personnel folks and coaches still hanging on to their evaluations from six years ago.

But Barkley will be joined on the market by Josh Jacobs and Tony Pollard (both were tagged in 2023), as well as Derrick Henry, D’Andre Swift and Austin Ekeler. So in that group, you have two former first-team All-Pros (Henry, Jacobs), three Pro Bowlers (Barkley, Pollard, Swift), and a back (Ekeler) with a 100-catch season to his credit. So if you’re a team needing someone at the position, it’s not like the supply-demand curve will be working against you.

Where does Barkley fit into all that? Again, it’ll be fascinating to see next week.

And I wouldn’t rule out a return to the Giants. Both sides have an interest in making it happen, and how that market shakes out will probably dictate whether it happens.

• I mistakenly left out a great Drake Maye quote from the weekend, and it’s one that I think really summed up our conversation. I’d asked him directly about what I’d heard—that his intensity wasn’t something NFL folks expected when they were meeting.

“Youngest of four boys, growing up for us, we’re a strong, Christian-based family, we’ve got some Southern charm, a little bit of a country drawl in us,” Maye says. “But at the end of the day, when it gets in between the lines, the motto is to go kick somebody’s ass. That’s what my parents always instilled in us. … Being the runt of the family, the youngest of four boys, kind of getting pushed around and beat up a little bit, I think my three older brothers definitely have it, but it comes out of me the most because I had to deal with it growing up.

“My parents, they say yes sir and yes ma’am and give off that Southern charm. But at the end of the day, go compete and be the winner, come out first, come out the winner.”

So, yeah, he was to the point.

• The cost the Denver Broncos incurred for Russell Wilson over the past two years is wild.

It was two top-10 picks (No. 9 in 2022, No. 5 in ’23), two more in the top 40 (No. 40 in ’22, No. 37 in ’23), Drew Lock, Shelby Harris, Noah Fant and $124.02 million (minus the offset in whatever Wilson makes with another team this year). And adding insult to injury, the pick they got in the back-end pick swap element of the deal—the Broncos got a fourth and sent the Seattle Seahawks a fifth, effectively moving a pick up 29 slots—became Eyioma Uwazurike.

Uwazurike was suspended indefinitely by the NFL last summer for gambling violations, while facing criminal charges for bets he placed while in college at Iowa State.

Seattle, on the other hand, ended up with the aforementioned veterans, foundational pieces at corner (Devon Witherspoon) and left tackle (Charles Cross), and a couple of edge players (Boye Mafe, Derick Hall) who have a real future with the team. So, yeah, this didn’t turn out to be an everyone wins scenario.

• What Wilson does next will be interesting because money really should be no object. He’s set to make $39 million in 2024. And barring someone exceeding that number, it won’t change regardless of what he gets from a new team.

So Wilson can market his quarterbacking services at the veteran minimum of $1.65 million and stick the Broncos with the remaining $37.35 million. The lower salary should make him more attractive to teams in a veteran quarterback market that could shake out to $40 million per year for Kirk Cousins and maybe $30 million per year for Baker Mayfield.

A team could stick a bigger second-year number on a deal for Wilson, but unless it came with guarantees, there wouldn’t be much reason for the quarterback to opt for that rather than the chance to be free again after this season.

• Speaking of Cousins, this hit me today—he made $28 million per year as a free agent in 2018. That’s just six years ago. By last summer, the top of the quarterback market had nearly doubled, with Joe Burrow taking home $55 million per on his new deal.

So just remember, next week, that these numbers are relative. And also, remember that $30 million or $40 million per year for Cousins or Mayfield isn’t that far out of line, either.

We did a whole story on that dynamic last year. Two of the teams featured fired coaches.

• Credit to ProFootballTalk for smoking out the real numbers on Mike Evans’s new two-year deal with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Its base value is $41 million, not the $52 million (which included all the incentives and escalators) that was floating around on social media. I could get on my high horse here, and tell you I think it’s dumb how these phony numbers get put out there, and how it’s all part of a silly game, but I do get that agents use this stuff in recruiting.

As for Evans, landing more than $20 million per year on a new deal after a decade in the league is good work, even if it’s not the $26 million it was advertised to be. It’s also good reason to think Mayfield gets done, because it’s hard to imagine Evans’s decision was made with a total leap of faith at quarterback.

• Two connections that are at least interesting to me on the Justin Fields front. One is former Chicago Bears GM Ryan Pace, who drafted Fields and is now with the Atlanta Falcons (where I’ve heard the owner also likes Fields). The other is former Bears coach Matt Nagy with the Kansas City Chiefs. If the bottom falls out on Fields’s market, would the Chiefs take him as a backup that they could, perhaps, develop? Andy Reid has always liked such projects at quarterback.

For now, my sense is that the unresolved Cousins and Mayfield situations might work to slow things down with other veteran quarterbacks. And the Falcons’ coaches connections to Cousins (Raheem Morris was with him in Washington, and offensive coordinator Zac Robinson worked under Kevin O’Connell with the Los Angeles Rams) might directly impact whether Atlanta is in play for Fields.

• The Philadelphia Eagles will miss Jason Kelce from a leadership standpoint, without question. But as for the on-field part, they’re as well equipped to manage the loss as you could hope to be. Fourth-year man Landon Dickerson has started 46 games at guard, and Cam Jurgens started 11 games at guard last year. Both played center in college—Dickerson at Alabama and Jurgens at Nebraska. So Philly has plenty of flexibility in how it’ll work that out.

• Smart move by the Baltimore Ravens to franchise Justin Madubuike. The tag costs $22.01 million. He’d have received an APY (average per year) well above that on the market.

• And I love the move by the Houston Texans to re-sign Dalton Schultz. Nico Collins and Tank Dell were incredible for Houston last year, no question. But C.J. Stroud relied on Schultz when it counted, so an investment in the tight end, in this case, is an investment in one of the NFL’s very best young quarterbacks.