Saquon Barkley ‘drug tested’ after outrageous performance in Eagles win over Rams

The NFL’s reputation for drug testing players after stellar individual performances resulted in a hilarious moment in the Philadelphia Eagles locker room.

After Saquon Barkley’s career-high 255-yard effort in a win over the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday, the MVP candidate found a drug testing notice in his booth in the visitor’s locker room.

Only this wasn’t the NFL calling for Barkley to be tested. It was a prank orchestrated by tight end Dallas Goedert.

“I’m not,” Barkley laughed to reporters. “I have been sufficiently tested for drugs.”

He’s not kidding.

During a recent outing against his former team, the New York Giants, Barkley managed to stump a defender on his way to a 176-yard rushing day.

The league responded by drug testing him immediately after the win.

“I got drug tested right after the game,” Barkley said on “Air It Out” in the days that followed.

Other NFL players have accused the league of carefully timing the supposedly random drug tests.

Barkley’s Eagles teammate AJ Brown said he was tested after a three-touchdown performance in 2022.

“Rogerrrrr, this is not random,” Brown wrote on X, referring to Commissioner Roger Goodell.

An NFL spokesperson did not respond directly to Brown’s claim at the time, but did share the league’s policy, which was collectively negotiated with the players’ union.

“Neither the union nor the NFL is involved in the random selection process as it is run by an independent administrator using a computer program,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy told DailyMail.com.

The NFL’s drug testing policy requires that 10 players from each team, randomly chosen by a computer, be screened for performance-enhancing drugs each week.

The league conducts approximately 18,000 PED tests during each preseason and season, most of which are random. About 8,000 PED tests are given to players placed in the “Reasonable Cause” testing program, McCarthy told Cleveland.com in 2019.

Players in the “Reasonable Cause” testing program were more likely to test positive or there was “sufficient credible evidence of steroid involvement up to two football seasons prior to his applicable college draft or with a scouting organization.”

Naturally, players have their suspicions about how random the tests are. Several players have accused the league of testing players who have strong performances.

In 2019, then-Cleveland Browns receiver Odell Beckham Jr. told Cleveland.com that he was targeted by the league.

“(The NFL) had me come in on Monday when we were having a bad day,” he said. ‘Had a drug test. I had to come over on Thursday after the game. Had another drug test.

“No one is tested like me,” Beckham continued. “I know people who haven’t been tested for five months in the offseason and I get tested every time.”

Browns defensive end Myles Garrett accused the league of testing him after he showed off his muscular arms in a few 2021 games.

“I wear sleeveless TWICE and get ‘random’ drug tested BOTH times,” Garrett tweeted last October. ‘I would try 3 for 3, but they can miss me because of the blood test and not because of the atmosphere. #SleevelessMyles is retired.”

Former San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid accused the league of testing him more after he spent much of the 2016 NFL season protesting alongside Colin Kaepernick. When Reid resurfaced with the Carolina Panthers in 2018 after filing a complaint against the league and accusing the owners of smearing him over the protests, the Pro Bowler claimed he was tested seven times in 11 weeks.

According to Yahoo Sports’ calculations, Reid had only a 1 in 588, or 0.17 percent chance, of being selected that many times over that period, given the NFL’s testing guidelines.

“I’ve been here 11 weeks and I’ve been drug tested seven times,” Reid told reporters. ‘That must be statistically impossible. I’m not a mathematician, but that definitely can’t be random.’

Through a joint investigation, the NFL and the NFL Players Association ultimately concluded that Reid was not improperly targeted by the league’s performance-enhancing drug testing program.

Reid was one of the first NFL players to join then-San Francisco 49ers teammate Colin Kaepernick in kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality and racial injustice.