The Commanders played the Eagles twice during the regular season, so they know what their opponent in the NFC Championship Game wants to do on offense.
Saquon Barkley has run for 2,329 yards in his 18 appearances for the Eagles this season and 296 of them came against the Commanders. Barkley ran for more than five yards a carry in those games and scored four touchdowns, which makes keeping him from ruining their day a top priority of the defense.
That’s been the priority for the Packers and the Rams the last two weeks as well and doing it is a very different story. On Thursday, Commanders linebacker Bobby Wagner explained what he thinks the team needs to do in order to keep Barkley from going off.
“You just try to contain him,” Wagner said, via audio from the team. “This is gonna be a game of discipline. The last game [against the Rams], they did a pretty decent job for the most part but he’s waiting for that one person to pop out of the gap. He’s waiting for that one person to be undisciplined. . . . That’s going to be our challenge — to be disciplined the whole time, the whole game. He has the ability and the talent to break a run at any given point, and we need to make sure that don’t happen.”
Beating the Eagles will take sharp performances across the board from the Commanders, but holding Barkley in check looms larger than most of the other items on the list.
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