Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Penn State’s Barkley lifts himself to top
STATE COLLEGE » Saquon Barkley bobs his head to Drake’s “Started at the Bottom” as he stands over a barbell loaded to 380 pounds.
The Penn State running back takes a step back and adjusts his shorts before bending down and taking a firm grip on the bar with both hands. With his chin up, back flat and knees bent, Barkley tugs on the gray steel, searching for just the right amount of tension in his arms. Up it goes. Barkley uncoils, and then quickly dips under the weight and back into squat, slipping the bar under his chin and onto his deltoids. His quads bulging, Barkley stands up straight to complete the power clean. He drops the bar to the mat, takes a couple breaths and repeats the feat twice more with relative ease.
A case can be made that Barkley is both the best and strongest running back in college football. To Barkley, he could not be the former without also being the latter. The broken tackles. The razor-sharp cuts that leave linebackers limp. The hurdles over and sprints past defensive backs. Everything Barkley does to send 100,000 Nittany Lions fans into a frenzy at Beaver Stadium can be traced back to the hours he has spent in the weight room, turning his body into a 228-pound NFL prototype.
“I’m a firm believer that the work you put in in the weight room translates to the field,” Barkley said. “Some people don’t really think it correlates. A lot of people think you have to do football specific stuff and that’s true. But I think football is a direct correlation with weightlifting. I think the stuff that you do — the explosive movements, the leg strength — helps you finish plays. Helps you break tackles.”
Coming off a sophomore season in which he ran for 1,496 yards, scored 22 touchdowns and helped the Nittany Lions finish in the top 10 for the first time since 2009, Barkley was overwhelmingly selected to the AP’s preseason All-America team released Tuesday.
Barkley’s passion for pumping iron was cultivated in a cement basement with no air conditioning beneath the fieldhouse of his eastern Pennsylvania high school. Whitehall was the smallest school in the state’s highest classification when Barkley was there.
Going back to the days when former NFL linebacker and Penn State star Matt Millen played at Whitehall, the Zephyrs have tried to make up the difference in the weight room.
“We were going against bigger schools and teams that had more players and had more opportunities to pick from players so we knew for us to win games we had to push ourselves,” Barkley said.
Barkley did not walk into Whitehall as a star. He wasn’t one of those kids who flashed NFL potential while dominating youth leagues the way Leonard Fournette did before becoming an AllAmerican at LSU and a firstround draft pick by Jacksonville. Barkley was a talented 160-pounder trying to contribute on both sides of the ball during his first two seasons at Whitehall. After his sophomore season, coach Brian Gilbert challenged Barkley to become a leader in the weight room. Barkley accepted. “We finish the weight room, typically guys they come in, they break down, they go home. His offseason going into his junior year, he would say ‘Who wants to stay after?”’ Gilbert said. “‘Coach how long you going to stay after?’ And they just kept doing workouts after our workouts. And they would go out to the field and do footwork drills. And that would turn into, ‘Hey, who wants to come in Saturday? Who wants to come in Sunday?”’
Barkley gained 30 pounds and had a breakthrough junior season. It only made him want to do more and it wasn’t just the physical gains that changed Barkley’s game.
“His confidence level went up because of his strength,” Gilbert said.
Barkley went from a hidden-gem who was committed to Rutgers after an early offer to one of the top recruits in Pennsylvania, with Penn State making him a priority. Still, Barkley was listed as only the 14th-best running back in the 2015 recruiting class, according to 247Sports’ composite rankings.
On the walls of Penn State’s climate-controlled, 13,000-square foot weight room, high above the equipment, hangs the Nittany Lions’ scoreboard: Player rankings by position and teamwide of various lifts and speed and agility drills going back to 2013.