Joe Judge hopes Saquon Barkley will be around the team as much as possible

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It’s a strange, upside-down year with COVID-19 protocols limiting access and changing rules for when and how players can get in the building. The Giants hope that, no matter what, the team will have the benefit of running back Saquon Barkley‘s presence as he recovers from a torn ACL.

“As much as we can have him around here, we absolutely want him to,” coach Joe Judge said, via Paul Schwartz of the New York Post. “This guy was elected captain by his teammates for a reason, and he’s an integral part of this program. . . . He’s a very positive guy, he’s a very team-first guy. The adversity he’s going through right now, he’s going to work as hard as he can. I can say that with absolute confidence. I’m very anxious to see him on the back end coming out of this thing, because I know the aggressiveness he’s preparing with. . . . But absolutely, we want Saquon around here as much as he can. Working around his schedule, he is a part of this team. He’s a part of this team, and we want him around as much as we can have him.”

There’s no indication that Barkley will simply disappear for the rest of the season. His first priority needs to be getting himself healthy, because the timing of his injury dramatically complicates the question of whether he’ll get a second contract from the Giants.

Ideally, he’d get his new contract after three seasons. In light of the injury, the Giants will want to be 100 percent certain he’s healthy before offering the kind of contract that transfers millions in injury risk to the team.

So if Barkley will need to come back and prove that he’s healthy during the 2021 season before getting paid, he’ll carry the risk of further injury until the Giants decide that they’ve seen enough to justify paying him. Barkley may decide that’s not good enough, drawing a line in the sand before he ever sets foot on the field again.

However it plays out, there’s a potentially awkward financial dance looming in 2021 between the Giants and Barkley. That’s one of the obvious potential complications of devoting a top-two draft pick on a running back.