Barkley is also ready for next season.
For some clubs, winning the league title and advancing to the season would be seen as some kind of success.
However, Barkley and the Eagles won the Super Bowl in 2024, and after reaching the mountaintop, the result in 2025 was not enough.
“There will be one winner and thirty-one losers,” Barkley said, “and the losers are all the same.
The goal is the same for Barkley as the inspiration.
In his first year with the Eagles, Barkley ran to historic success. He became the ninth player in NFL history to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season and hit 2,005 (eighth all-time). Barkley sat out Week 18, just 100 yards shy of Eric Dickerson’s single-season rushing record of 2,105.
He did, however, bring home the AP NFL Offensive Player of the Year. The Super Bowl was indeed the crowning achievement.
Encore was an inappropriate sequel. Barkley rushed for 1,140 yards on 18i.e-ranked rushing offense, a season after he won a rushing title as part of the second-ranked rushing offense. And Philadelphia went 11-6 for losses.
The positive side of it all is that it has been fuel for Barkley and his teammates throughout the offseason.
“So that’s motivation for me — try to get back in that game,” Barkley said. “That’s why I train the way I train. I would have loved to have started faster last year, but you can’t get caught up in the stats. You can’t get too caught up in numbers. Some of my better years weren’t based on numbers. It was based on how I handled myself in certain situations.”