In a season full of monster runs and career milestones, Saquon Barkley enjoyed his biggest game in Week 12, when he and the Philadelphia Eagles put on a show at SoFi Stadium.
The Los Angeles Rams were competitive in the first half, although Barkley rushed for 70 yards over those two quarters and the Eagles led 13-7 at the break. Philly’s dominant rushing attack took the game over in the second half, with Barkley ripping off TD runs of 70 and 72 yards on his way to a franchise record 255 yards on the night. The Eagles rushed for 314 total as a team.
The Eagles dominated the line of scrimmage on both sides of the football in that first meeting, also harassing quarterback Matthew Stafford with 17 total pressures, five sacks and 11 QB hits in a 37-20 win. The teams are set to meet again on Sunday in the Divisional Round of the NFC playoffs, and the Rams are going to need a lot more than better X’s and O’s to upset Philly, outdoors at Lincoln Financial Field.
That hasn’t stopped the Rams from becoming a trendy upset pick among NFL analysts and experts.
John Breech of CBS Sports and Dan Orlovsky of ESPN both backed the Rams publicly this week, and Garrett Podell, Breech’s colleague, recently joined the party with a bold — if not highly questionable — take on the Rams’ chances of containing Barkley this time around.
Podell predicts the Rams will hold Barkley under 100 yards in Sunday’s playoff game. How is that possible? Here was his take for CBSSports.com:
Well, 162 of his 255 rushing yards were after contact in the regular season, per NFL Pro. There’s no way Los Angeles can miss enough tackles and take enough bad angles to where it allows that again.
Yes, Barkley did total 829 rushing yards before contact this season, the most by any player in a season since at least 2017 when the NFL’s Next Gen Stats began tracking this metric. However, a hot Rams defense will contain the league’s best running back to under the century mark on Sunday.
Was it a fluke that the Eagles decimated the Rams for 7.0 yards per carry back in November? That appears to be the growing sentiment, and it would be a sounder theory if Barkley didn’t finish as the NFL’s rushing champion on a team that prides itself on running the football. Philly attempted the fewest pass attempts in football during the regular season. It’s not like the Rams, or any other team for that matter, didn’t know what was coming.
The other layer to these upset predictions is the change in stakes and venue this time around. Back in Week 12, the Rams were the more desperate team, entering the game at home with a 5-5 record. This time, a trip to the NFC Championship Game is on the line, and the game will be played at the Linc in Philly’s weather.
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The Rams are a great football team, but that first meeting was no fluke.
The Eagles have routinely been a second-half team this year, wearing opponents out by the fourth quarter. The Rams barely got to Jalen Hurts, couldn’t cover A.J. Brown, and got smoked by Barkley on the ground the last time out. It’s going to be extremely difficult to reverse all of that, on the road, in adverse elements, against a more physical team.
