New York Giants running back Saquon Barkley saw a substantial drop in his ranking on NFL Network’s Top 100 Players of 2020 list, falling from No. 16 overall to No. 31 overall.
The slide was understandable given that Barkley struggled a bit last season after suffering a high-ankle sprain, but it doesn’t necessarily explain his ranking on the Touchdown Wire Top 101 Players list.
A year ago, Barkley checked in at No. 27 on that list, but fell all the way to No. 86.
Barkley’s 2019 season was mostly a disappointment after he led the NFL with 2,028 yards from scrimmage in his rookie campaign. A high ankle sprain diminished his effectiveness for much of his second season, and the nadir of that was his 13-carry, one-yard performance against the Jets in Week 10 where he couldn’t bounce outside, he was missing three starters on the offensive line, and his own pass protection was uncharacteristically awful.
That criticism of Barkley had been previously shared by Touchdown Wire’s Doug Farrar, who doubled-down on Barkley perhaps not being the transcendent player we all believed him to be as a rookie.
Barkley isn’t as quite as transcendent as one might have assumed in his rookie season, but he’s better than what he showed in the middle of the 2019 season when it seemed that everything possible was aligned against him. His third season will say a lot about his future potential.
Comparatively, Barkley ranked seventh among all running backs in the league.
