As the Giants get ready to fly across the pond to play the Green Bay Packers in London, it’s appropriate to look back at the first four weeks and smile. Seriously, when was the last time New York has been above .500 and playing relevant football in October?
It’s been a while, let’s just put it that way. The Giants’ Week 4 win at MetLife Stadium over the Chicago Bears wasn’t exactly pretty. That’s especially the case when looking at New York’s air attack. Thankfully, they have a dynamic playmaker in the backfield by the name of Saquon Barkley.
Between Daniel Jones and Tyrod Taylor, the two quarterbacks for Big Blue combined to complete 9-of-16 passes for just 71 yards and one interception. The two touchdowns the G-Men scored on Sunday both came from Jones, but they were rushing touchdowns. New York is seriously lacking some big-play ability from its wide receiver room. Naturally, they needed to use the one guy on their roster with home-run ability in Barkley.
That was the one part of the offensive game plan that went swimmingly. The Giants rushed for 262 total yards, with Barkley collecting 146 of them on 31 carries. This was his second effort of 100-plus yards this season, and the fourth straight week he’s collected at least 70.
All this brings Barkley’s total rushing yards to 463. While that’s tops in the league at moment, he’s also on an interesting pace regarding Giants history.
Your weekly reminder that Saquon Barkley is good at football (when healthy):
Most rushing yards in Giants history through 4 games:
2022 Saquon Barkley 463
2004 Tiki Barber 455
1993 Rodney Hampton 430
2003 Tiki Barber 391via @ESPNStatsInfo
— Jordan Raanan (@JordanRaanan) October 3, 2022
That’s not a bad spot to be at after the season’s first four games, right?
Any Giants running back who wants to eventually challenge the franchise’s single-season rushing title will have to go through Tiki Barber to get it. He not only holds the record with 1,860 rushing yards in 2005, but the football player-turned-radio-personality owns four of the top five spots.
This includes a three-year stretch where he rattled off the three best rushing seasons in Giants history. It started with breaking Joe Morris’ record with 1,518 yards in 2004 before breaking his own record the following year. Then in 2006, he landed right in the middle with 1,662 yards.
We can see that Barkley isn’t too far down on this list, either. His 1,307 rushing yards as a rookie are among the most in franchise history.
As the Giants prepare for Week 5, Barkley should continue to be one of the offensive focal points, so he’ll have a chance to keep racking up yards. As it stands right now, he needs just 130 more to equal last year’s total. Barkley has reached that number in 78 fewer carries, boosting his yards per carry number from 3.7 to its current 5.5 mark.
Matt Musico can be reached at matt.musico@xlmedia.com and you can follow him on Twitter: @mmusico8.
