Najee Harris calls out Giants over Saquon Barkley's contract
Pittsburgh Steelers running back Najee Harris openly expressed his frustration with the way the position is treated around the NFL — one day after Saquon Barkley secured a deal with the New York Giants to bring an end to an offseason-long stalemate.
“Saquon accumulated for almost 30% of the offense,” Harris said Wednesday, via Brooke Pryor of ESPN. “Why can’t you look at that and say, ‘OK, well he said he’s not trying to break the market or set the market, but he’s trying to get compensated of what he thinks is fair … I know that they know themselves, that ain’t fair what he’s getting. He wanted a long contract to know his security there. Right now, he doesn’t have no security. They’re just going to probably utilize him the same way. And if something happens to him again, they’re going to probably look somewhere else.
“It’s like, man, what is the security that we have? We don’t have no security right now. You guys are using us to accomplish what you guys want. And then when it’s time for us to re-up or ask for something that we think is right, you guys just turn the cheek and say, ‘Well, you have wear and tear.'”
Barkley, who declined to sign his $10.091 franchise tag, agreed to an adjusted one-year contract worth up to $11 million which includes a $2 million signing bonus. Both Barkley and Harris were among the running backs across the league who held a Zoom meeting this past weekend to air their grievances.
Najee Harris details running back Zoom meeting
Harris revealed that one of the topics discussed was not franchise-tagging players according to position.
“For them to say that the running back position, you’re slotted at this much money. I don’t think that that’s right because of what we’re asked to do,” Harris said. “There’s a lot of running backs who’s doing receiving. There’s a lot of running backs doing blocking and all that stuff. For you to just say running back and that’s our market, and if it doesn’t hit that, then it goes down lower. That’s not right. They need to change that.”
Harris added he believes teams “just don’t want to pay a running back.”
“They ask me alone — ‘The game’s going to rely on you, you need to do this for the team, you got to do this right here. Hey, it’s time to close out the game. Hey, we need to lean on you right now,'” Harris said. “And it happens a lot of places like Cleveland, Tennessee, even with the Niners. There’s numerous teams where this happens at.
“… Only time when they choose to say that [the position] is devalued is when it’s time to pay the running back. … Not devalued at all. They just don’t want to pay a running back.”
Harris, meanwhile, opted not to talk about his upcoming fifth-year option. The 25-year-old rushed for 1,034 yards on 3.8 yards per carry and seven touchdowns in 2022.