Giants' Co-owner John Mara Says Team Isn't Looking to Trade Saquon Barkley
The New York Giants might be desperate to scrape together salary cap space to accommodate the signing of their rookie class as well as any moves they might need to make in the coming season, but don’t expect them to part with running back Saquon Barkley, who has a $7.2 million guaranteed cap hit this year thanks to the team’s exercising of his option year.
Team co-owner John Mara, speaking with reporters at the NFL Owners meetings this week in Palm Beach, Florida, told reporters that the team isn’t looking to move the fifth-year running back, but added that if general manager Joe Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll feel otherwise, he won’t stand in their way of doing so.
“Joe’s the general manager,” Mara told reporters. “If he and the head coach want to make a personnel decision and they have a conviction about it, I’m not going to interfere with it. But that’s not something we’re actively looking to do.”
Earlier this month at the combine, both Schoen and Daboll spoke as though they were preparing to move ahead with Barkley as part of the team, with Daboll confirming that some plays were being drawn up to take advantage of the former Penn State star’s unique skillset.
The Daily News suggested that the Giants haven’t received a strong enough offer for Barkley to make them want to move on from him.
But there are questions about Barkley’s long-term future with the team. Mara, in the past, has expressed a desire to see Barkley be a Giant for life, a similar sentiment he expressed with receiver Odell Beckham Jr whom the team traded one year after signing him to an extension.
Barkley’s situation is slightly different, however. Whereas Beckham proved to be more of a distraction for the team’s taste, Barkley has been a model face of the franchise whose only vice has been an inability to get through an entire season without an injury since 2019, his second year in the league.
However, if he goes on to have the type of year, the franchise believes he’s capable of having in 2022 when he’d be two years removed from ACL surgery, that will likely put the Giants in a difficult spot as far as deciding whether to extend him to a lucrative contract or letting him walk away in free agency and taking a potential compensatory draft pick in return.
Mara has been consistent in his backing of quarterback Daniel Jones, even going so far as to admit that the organization did everything possible to screw the kid up thanks to its failure to provide Jones with stability from a coaching, scheme, and personnel perspective.
Thus it was no surprise that Mara reaffirmed the organization’s confidence in Jones as its quarterback for the coming season. However, he stopped short of confirming any plans for the team to exercise the option year of Jones’s contact, a decision of which needs to be made by May 2.
“That’s not a decision we’ve made as of yet,” Mara said. “That’s a discussion we’ll be having over the next month.
Mara said the Giants are not planning to settle the lawsuit filed against them by former Dolphins head coach Brian Flores because he insisted that the allegations of faulty hiring for the team’s head coach are “false.”
The Giants have strongly denied any wrong-doing associated with their search for a new head coach earlier this year that led to the hiring of Daboll from a candidate pool that included Flores, Patrick Graham, Leslie Frazier, Dan Quinn, and Lou Anarumo.
Flores, who was hired to be an assistant coach on Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin’s staff, has kept his lawsuit against the Giants and the rest of the NFL open.
According to the Daily News, the Giants are reportedly expected to trade cornerback James Bradberry any day now, and three potential trade partners have emerged for Bradberry’s services.
Those three include the Chiefs, Colts, and Texans, all teams with the cap space and the draft capital to make a trade for Bradberry work.
The Giants will gain just over $12 million of salary cap relief if they complete a trade of Bradberry, a 2020 Pro Bowl cornerback. The Giants are thought to be looking to select a cornerback in next month’s draft.
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