Mid-season NFL awards

Offensive Rookie of the Year:

Saquon Barkley

I would like to give you a different answer here than the first-round pick of a 1-7 team, but Saquon simply has been too amazing as an individual player and displayed why I had him as my number one overall prospect in the draft. Through the first eight games of the year, he is just three receiving yards short of being on pace for a 1000 / 1000 season, meaning he might become the third player ever to reach the thousand yard mark through the air and on the ground. This feat is even more impressive when you consider the circumstances he is in.

A couple of weeks ago I had Eli Manning ranked as the worst starter in the entire league and their offense has been stagnant in most of their games, because of the inability and seeming unwillingness to push the ball down the field for large portions of the games. Without that threat of the vertical passing game combined with the sub-par performance of the Giants offensive line, Saquon rarely has gotten through the line with any sort of daylight. He has been bottled up for large portions of their games or even met in the backfield before exploding for big plays. He is now tied for first among all NFL players with seven runs of 20+ yards and three of 40+ yards.

In the passing game, he is also tied for fourth with 48 catches because Eli checks it down to him constantly and for the most part he has had to completely stop for the ball and then redirect to make something out of nothing. With that being said, his jump-cuts to even skip gaps and avoid defenders that have him dead to rights by leveraging technically correctly is unique, he consistently makes the first defender miss in the open field and when he has a full head of steam, he is incredibly tough to bring down, especially because nobody can square him up in that situation.

Also considered: Kerryon Johnson, Calvin Ridley, Sam Darnold