If Saquon Barkley rushes for 101 yards against the New York Giants, he will become the NFL’s single season rushing record holder. In 1984, Eric Dickerson ran for 2,105 yards, and Barkley currently sits at 2,005. here are a couple of obstacles facing the frontrunner for Offensive Player of the Year, and even if he overcomes those obstacles and breaks the record, there are some who believe it will have an asterisk next to it.
The first obstacle facing Barkley will be playing time. There is a chance the Philadelphia Eagles, who have secured the number two seed in the NFC, and have no shot at the top seed, will sit their starters for the last game of the season. Football is a war of attrition, and never more so, than in the playoffs. Having a healthy roster is more important than anything when the postseason starts. For that reason, teams who have already secured a spot, typically bench their starters the last game of the year, to give them essentially an extra bye week.
The Eagles have already won the NFC East. Even if they lose their last game, putting them at 13-4, it’s impossible for the Rams and Bucs can’t take the second seed from them. If they win, and improve to 14-3, they can’t better their position. The Vikings and Lions are both 14-2, and they play each other the last week of the year. One of them will walk away 15-2, and a wild card team can’t get a better seed than a division champ, even if they have a better record. Since it’s impossible for the Eagles to do better than the two seed, or worse than the two seed, there’s no point in them playing their starters.
It’s likely the Eagles will give Barkley the option to play or not, since he’s so close to the record. The Giants have given up 141.6 yards per game on the ground (second worst in the league behind the Carolina Panthers). Should Barkley choose to play, he should break the record. When the two teams met on October 20th, Barkley put up 176 yards on 17 carries. When the final whistle blows, no player in NFL history will have run for more yards in a season, so he would be the new record holder, right?
There is a faction of football fans who think that Barkley will not be the record holder, since it took him 17 games to break the record, and Dickerson set his mark in a 16-game season. What they fail to acknowledge is that Dickerson broke OJ Simpson’s record of 2,003 yards, which Simpson set in just 14 games in 1973. Through 14 games in 1984, Dickerson had just 1,792 yards, so if Barkley gets an asterisk, then shouldn’t Dickerson get one as well?
In 1958, Jim Brown ran for 1,527 yards in 12 games. Simpson did have 1,584 through 12 games in 1973, so he wouldn’t need an asterisk, I think? Just as Deadpool mentioned how confusing the X-Men timeline is when he got his own movie in 2016, there’s nothing more confusing than how fans are “supposed” to track these records. Is 1,584 rushing yards the record, or is it 2,003, or is it 2,105? The reality is, the record holder is the guy with the most yards in a season, no matter how many games he played to get there.
If we start throwing asterisks around like ninja throwing stars, then they aren’t limited to single seasons. They have to be applied to career stats as well. Emmitt Smith has 18,355 yards rushing in 226 games. Walter Payton had 16,726 in 190 games. Smith had 16,365 in his first 190 games in the NFL, so does his record have an asterisk next to it? Barry Sanders ran for 15,269 yards in 153 games, so should he be the career record holder, even though he played after Payton and never passed him? After all, Payton had 13,843 in 153 games, so he needed 37 extra games to pass a guy who didn’t have a single rushing yard when Payton retired.
It’s ludicrous, and going down this road only gets crazier. The NFL will have to have separate records for guys who played 1 game, 2 games, 3 games, ect. Is it reasonable to expect them to have separate stats for every single length of a player’s career? Every league adds games, and in the blink of an eye, the NFL will add an 18th game. More records will fall in those seasons, and they won’t be diminished by idiot fans, and they certainly won’t get asterisks. One more time for the people in back, “Records are records, no matter how many games they are set in.”
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