No Mas: Why Saquon wasn’t tempted to keep running vs. Packers originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
Saquon Barkley saw nothing but green grass in front of him, a chance for a 76-yard touchdown run to put an exclamation point on the Eagles’ wild-card round win.
Instead, he slid after 17 yards to simply end the game.
“It wasn’t tempting,” Barkley said after Sunday’s 22-10 win over the Packers. “Situational football. No mas. It’s first down, you win the game. Get the first down, get down. Don’t matter.”
“No mas” is the Eagles situational call in the 4-minute drill and Barkley listened. When the Eagles are in “no mas,” it simply means that a first down wins the game; don’t try to get anymore. So when Barkley took a handoff with 1:09 left in a two-score game and broke free, he simply decided to go down after 17 yards.
As much as it annoyed some of his teammates — the mic’d up segment with DeVonta Smith and A.J. Brown is hilarious — that play just shows how selfless Barkley really is as a player.
Had Barkley taken that run to the house, the Eagles probably would have ended up winning 29-10 and Barkley would have finished with 178 yards on 25 carries. Instead, the Eagles still won 22-10 and Barkley finished with 119. Even if Barkley didn’t score, he could have at least picked up another 20 or 30 yards.
Barkley left as many as 59 yards on the table as he chases Terrell Davis’s all-time record for rushing yards in a regular season and postseason. While Barkley sat out in Week 18, missing a chance to break Eric Dickerson’s single-game regular season record, he still has a shot for the one Davis set in 1998, when Davis rushed for 2,476 yards in the regular season and playoffs.
1. Terrell Davis (1998): 2,476
2. Terrell Davis (1997): 2,331
3. Eric Dickerson (1984): 2,212
4. Adrian Peterson (2012): 2,196
5. Saquon Barkley (2024): 2,124
If you’re wondering, Baltimore’s Derrick Henry this year is 9th on the all-time list with 2,107 and is right on Barkley’s heels after Baltimore advanced to the divisional round as well.
Had Barkley taken that run to the house, he’d be a little closer to Davis’s record.
But that slide ensured that the Eagles walked away with a victory and didn’t put their players back into harm’s way as they moved on to the divisional round.
Head coach Nick Sirianni on Monday praised Barkley’s play and went through several examples of situations where “no mas” has come into play before. Sirianni mentioned a Dallas Goedert play from 2021, Sydney Brown’s interception in Week 18 this year, a play from Bears vs. 49ers several years ago, a play from Browns vs. Jets a couple years ago, a preseason game in 2021.
It’s clear how much thought goes into all of these situations and Sirianni was proud that Barkley simply went down.
“So that’s something we practice,” Sirianni said. “That’s something that we talk about. That’s something that Saquon asked before he even went in. ‘Hey are we in no mas?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, we are.’ That means get the first down and go down. He performed it perfectly. It’ll be a clip that we’ll show, just like we show Dallas’s, and just like we show all the other ones forever.
“You do that for the exact reasons I said. Now, when you go up three scores at that point, it might not make that big of a difference. We understand that. …You don’t mess around with things like that. You have an opportunity to take knees, you take those opportunities.”
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