Saquon Barkley thinks the Eagles line will finally allow him to show his ‘true potential.’ Scary thought.

Training camp is a great time to see whatever it is you are hoping to see. The greater your emotional investment in a regular-season outcome, the greater your chance of seeing signs of it on the practice field. Really, you could not construct a more perfect experiment to study the effects of observation bias than a month of intrasquad football practices.

There is a fun exercise that illustrates this point. Go to Google and type in the words “Quez Watkins.” Then, type in the words “great camp” or “great training camp.” Then, pick a random year. Hit the search button and enjoy the stroll down memory lane.

The phenomenon is not limited to the Eagles. Witness all the side-eye emojis that circulated on social media alongside a recent video clip of Justin Fields throwing a deep touchdown pass in Steelers camp. Here, clear as day, was evidence that the Bears had erred in giving up on their former first-round draft pick. And not just the Bears! There were 31 other NFL teams who entered camp with somebody other than Fields as their starting quarterback. Including the Steelers. Well, look at him now.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the notion that a player is having a “good camp” or a “bad camp.” Camps exist for a reason. But they are limited in their ability to reveal much more than the best 53 players out of a pool of 90. The more consequential question is how those players stack up against the ones from the other 31 training camps. Answering it requires enough mental fill-in-the-blank to compromise the integrity of the whole exercise.

I mention all of this mostly to serve as a counterweight to a play that I’m about to describe. It occurred in the middle of one of the Eagles’ first 11-on-11 scrimmages of this year’s training camp. Saquon Barkley took a shotgun handoff from Jalen Hurts and glided to his left as a crease opened before him like a jagged fault line. It was more than a crease, really. More like a double-wide channel of open grass. Barkley moved through it like it was an empty high school hallway, beating a would-be tackler to the sideline, squaring his incomparably wide lower half, and tight-roping through contact toward the end zone.

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“It just felt natural,” the running back said after practice. “It felt like we’ve been doing this for a long time. I kind of set the linebacker up, and I went front door, got a big gain. It was wide open. I’m looking forward to that. I’m super excited about that.”

It was a tantalizing sight for anybody who has grown accustomed to watching Barkley run behind the Giants offensive line. When the Eagles’ signed the superstar running back to a three-year, $37.75 million contract this offseason, skeptics wondered aloud just how much tread was left on his tires. They pointed to his pedestrian 2023 numbers: 247 carries, 962 yards, six touchdowns. They noted that he had averaged a pedestrian 4.0 yards per carry in his last four seasons, down from the 4.8 he averaged in his rookie and sophomore campaigns. What they failed to note was that, in totality, his first six years in the league were mostly an exercise in running through brick walls.

As much as the Giants have struggled in pass protection in recent years, they somehow have been even worse on the ground. Only once in Barkley’s tenure did their run-blocking performance grade out as high as 14th, according to Pro Football Focus. Mostly, they ranked in the bottom third of the league. In 2023 they were third-worst.

Throughout Barkley’s time in New York, a question lingered. What would this guy look like behind a line that could actually block? In 2023, Barkley averaged just 1.9 yards before contact, which ranked 36th out of 48 qualified rushers. Compare that to the 2.8 yards-before-contact that D’Andre Swift averaged behind the Eagles offensive line. Pair that number with the 2.0 yards-after-contact that Barkley averaged (17th in the NFL) and suddenly you are looking at 1,185 yards on 247 carries in only 14 games. That’s a 17-game pace of 1,400-plus yards.

“That’s the reason why I wanted to come here,” Barkley said. “The offensive line, history shows that they’ve been really good, and I feel like it’s going to help me show my true potential. No disrespect to anybody else in the past, but that’s the reason why I wanted to come here.”

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True potential. It’s amazing to think that Barkley might yet achieve it at 27 years old and in his seventh season in the league. But it’s well within the realm of possibility. In addition to Jeff Stoutland’s best-in-class run blocking schemes, Barkley will benefit from the two best wide receivers he has ever played with, plus a quarterback who actually commands the attention of a defense. In New York, Barkley was the focal point. Opposing defensive coordinators could orient their entire game plan toward stopping him. With the Eagles, he is one of four.

Expect big things.