With Saquon Barkley, the Eagles don’t have to ‘worry ‘bout a thing’

Stevie Wonder was playing in a happy Eagles locker room late Thursday night, and Saquon Barkley had just enough time before encroaching reporters reached his locker stall to sing a line from the chorus.

Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing, Barkley sang softly.

It was the story of the night. It is the story of the season. With Barkley, the Eagles don’t have to worry about a thing.

For 45-plus minutes, the Eagles were doing just about everything better than Washington except in the only category that matters — the scoreboard. They were dominating in yards gained. Their defense was stingy. If not for missed Jake Elliott kicks, poor red-zone play, and shaky decision making from Jalen Hurts, the Eagles would have been leading.

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Then the running game finally showed its force. The Eagles’ go-ahead drive started on their own 24-yard line late in the third quarter with a 9-yard Barkley run. It featured carries from Kenneth Gainwell of 14, 13, and 7 yards. Barkley’s 3-yard run put the Eagles at the 1-yard line, and they pushed their quarterback over the goal line on the next play. Then, after the defense forced a turnover on downs, Barkley put the game away.

Hurts hit Dallas Goedert for a 32-yard gain to push the Eagles onto Washington’s side of the field. Three plays later, on a third-and-3 from the 23-yard line, Barkley took a shotgun handoff from Hurts and ran to his right, burst through a big hole created by Lane Johnson, and was off to the races to put the Eagles up two scores with 4 minutes, 58 seconds to play.

Twenty seconds later, after a Reed Blankenship interception, the game was over. Hurts, taking a snap from under center, tossed the ball to Barkley, who started to his right and then cut to his left and went 39 yards untouched into the end zone.

He dropped the ball in the end zone — nearly before he reached the plane, he admitted later — put his arms out and sprinted to the Eagles sideline, a two-game lead in the loss column in the vapor trail behind him.

“That’s the beauty of football,” Barkley said. “You can stop us for 20-something carries, but when you rip off two long ones when it matters most, the stats look pretty good and most times you get a win.”

Barkley’s final stat line was 146 yards on 26 carries and two scores, the sixth time he has topped 100 yards in 10 games this season. He eclipsed the 1,000-yard mark for the fourth time in his career, and the Eagles still have seven games to play. Barkley added 52 yards on a pair of catches, including a 43-yard catch and run midway through the third quarter to extend a drive that ended with the Eagles cutting a 10-3 deficit to 10-6.

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Take away those two long touchdown scores, though, and Barkley’s right. It was just 84 yards on 24 carries, a per-carry average of 3.5 yards. It was a frustrating first half for a pass-happy offense. Hurts struggled to find open receivers, and Eagles rushers infrequently found room to run. The Eagles had three points at halftime, in part because of two Elliott misses.

The Eagles had some tinkering to do. Washington, left guard Landon Dickerson said, made pregame adjustments to the Eagles, and now the Eagles had to respond with some of their own. What were they? “Why would I tell you that? I’m not giving you grandma’s secret recipe,” Dickerson said.

Johnson was slightly more forthcoming. “We had some plays that we saved and didn’t run the first half that we did a good job of hitting on in the second half,” he said. Barkley credited run game coordinator and offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland and running backs coach Jemal Singleton with making some changes at halftime.

“We don’t panic,” Barkley said. “We trust in each other. We know one of us, somebody, is going to make a play. In the running game, we felt like we were one read off or one block off.”

Jordan Mailata, back from a hamstring injury, had a simpler explanation: “I think it was just will,” he said. “I think you have to want it more than the other team.”

The simplest answer, though, is that the Eagles have Barkley. The Eagles are 8-2, and it’s hard to imagine they’d be anywhere near six games above .500 if they hadn’t opted to sign Barkley in the offseason.

Hard to imagine, too, that they would be on this six-game winning streak had Johnson, Dickerson, and Mailata not gone to Nick Sirianni to implore the coach to help the Eagles get back to their running ways. The Eagles ran the ball 40 times Thursday night. They have run it more than 40 times per game during their winning streak. A few of those games have been blowouts, and you run the ball when you’re winning big, but they’re winning big in part because they’re running the ball.

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“When we get the running game going, it’s kind of hard to beat our team,” Barkley said. “But the beauty of that is we have a lot of other great talent on this team, too. We’ve got to find ways to continue to get them involved and keep taking it one game at a time.”

A sound approach, but recent results have shown that it all starts with him. Barkley has been the X factor, one who, especially on Thursday night, can change everything.

“It makes you look a lot better than maybe what you are,” Johnson quipped about Barkley’s presence.

“I knew the guy was a special player,” Mailata said. “The what-ifs, the possibilities of what he could do behind our offensive line, you don’t really know what to expect until you see it, until he does something. Special player, man. I’m glad he’s on our side.”

While the result was still in question Thursday night, Mailata turned to Barkley and said: “I’ll be damned if we lose this game in my comeback game.”

Barkley, Mailata said, responded: “I got you.”

Later, after he delivered on his words, Barkley found Mailata. “I told you,” he said.

He could have just sung Stevie’s lyrics.