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New York Giants general manager Joe Schoen wanted to keep Saquon Barkley, but he also wanted to make sure he wasn’t paying him too much relative to the running back market.
The second episode of “Hard Knocks: Offseason with the New York Giants” detailed how Schoen approached contract negotiations with Barkley once the team ruled out franchise-tagging him for a second straight year. Throughout the episode, Schoen discussed his desire to keep Barkley at good value while wrestling with the delicate nature of not making an offer that he might view as insulting.
During the NFL Scouting Combine, Schoen provided the gist of his Barkley pitch in a discussion with assistant general manager Brandon Brown.
“Hey, here is our price,'” Schoen said he would tell Barkley. “You want your name up here forever? Two more years, you’re in the Ring of Honor. Or you want a million dollars more to go somewhere else?”
Schoen discussed his pitch with Brown again over the phone on March 5, eight days prior to free agency. As Schoen was worried about making Barkley feel “disrespected” with an initial offer, Brown gave him a tough but simple question to answer.
“When you’re in your room at night when you’re by yourself, are you like, ‘I wouldn’t mind if this kid bounced?'” Brown asked.
Schoen continued to focus on contract value in his response to Brown.
“I think he can still play, but you have to get the value right,” Schoen said as he referred to a running back’s production falling off at age 27. “You look at the data. The data is what it is.”
When Schoen’s conversation with Brown ended, he called Barkley to let him know that the team would let him hit the open market.
“Just mulling over this, the right thing to do is let you test the market to see what your value is,'” Schoen told Barkley. “Um, I don’t want to do the franchise [tag] thing or all that stuff again. I don’t want to go through that. We’ve both been through that. If you really want to be a Giant for life and you’re interested in…
Source link : https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/hard-knocks-details-giants-pitch-saquon-barkley-approach-adding-qb
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Publish date : 2024-07-10 15:20:26
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