It’s cool if you’re able to see Jalen Hurts slander and ignore it because the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl, and he was the Super Bowl MVP. That’s an enviable amount of mental and emotional health. For the rest of us, we see the disrespect, and it eats.
It doesn’t eat because people don’t like him; it eats because the rationale behind taking him out of the top tier level of quarterbacks is loaded with confidently bad opinions, and ding-dong-brained logic. Sure, the Eagles won it all, but I’m not going to sit here and let my guy get left off the plane when he’s got a first-class ticket.
You don’t have to fabricate bulletin board material when they do it for you
Pretty much everybody is emptying the bucket before training camps start with their player rankings. NFL.com is doing its Top-100 players list, PFF did its whole thing with their weird grades, and now ESPN is releasing their survey of anonymous NFL execs, coaches, and scouts. On Monday, they released the quarterback ranking… and the Jalen Hurts disrespect train is still rolling.
Hurts, the reigning Super Bowl MVP, was ranked the ninth-best quarterback, and what makes it extra irritating is that the ranking comes from the votes that ESPN compiled. You’re telling me that a whole gang of these dweebs think that Jared Goff, Jayden Daniels, Matt Stafford, and Justin Herbert are better than Jalen Hurts? Get out of here with that.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Jalen Hurts has the strongest arm, the most speed, the most creativity, or that he’s the purest thrower. Josh Allen is a missile silo, Lamar Jackson is a burner, Patrick Mahomes is a wizard, and Joe Burrow would throw the ball 100 times a game if he had to (he might have to).
Those guys are perennially ranked in the top four because they are phenomenal at doing their specific thing, and they’re also really good at a few of the other things as well.
To me, the things that matter for a quarterback are their ability to run their offense, not make mistakes, to make plays, and to help their team by taking over games. Jalen Hurts does all of those things better than any other quarterback in the NFL.
The biggest argument against Jalen Hurts is that he has the best supporting cast in the NFL. That shouldn’t be a knock, but somehow it is. The thing is, Hurts doesn’t just benefit from it; he runs, adapts, and wins with it.
When the offense wanted to stay on the ground (which it did a lot last season), he was able to make checks and change plays when he needed to, and also be the plus one in the running game. If you have a soul-crushing running back, why would you force a passing game? That’d be a war crime.
If the running game didn’t work, like in the Super Bowl, he was able to switch it up, and that’s not something every quarterback can do.
Jalen Hurts is versatile
Go back to Week 8 last season when the Eagles went to Cincinnati: Joe Burrow threw for 157 yards in the first half of that game, and when the Eagles' defense started to click and shut the passing game down, the entire Bengals offense folded. Burrow threw for 65 yards in the second half, and they never had the run game to pick up the slack.
That's especially noteworthy because for a good chunk of the season, the Bengals’ short passes were their running game … and also, the Bengals had one of the higher-powered offenses in the league.
Even when the best of the best run into trouble, they can’t always pivot like Hurts doe s… Hell, Bill Belichick made a career of completely taking away one aspect of a team’s offense and crippling them. Hurts was pretty much impervious to that last season.
On top of that, he also uses his offensive line. Remember that whole thing where Jason Kelce retired after the 2023 season? Remember how he was the best center in the world, and one of his jobs was to call protections? Remember how that job went to Hurts? Remember how last season was Hurts' first time calling protections, and he was expected to do it at the level of a future Hall of Famer? Remember how in the biggest game of the season, Hurts was able to read Steve Spagnuolo’s defense like it was a Pop Warner team? That was pretty sick.
Jalen Hurts doesn't make sense
Hurts also doesn’t make many gutting mistakes. Sure, at the beginning of the season, he had some interception problems, but in the 16 games after the bye, he only threw two interceptions. One of those was a super sick play by Trevon Diggs in Week 10, and one was because of a weird decision Saquon Barkley made in pass protection during the Super Bowl that left a free rusher in Hurts’ lap.
He just doesn’t put the ball in danger. It can be frustrating watching him roll out and huck the ball out of bounds, but you’d rather that happen than him forcing an interceptable ball … especially in the postseason, like the guy in Detroit.
The play-making ability of Jalen Hurts cannot be denied. It’s not the same as the whole ‘Lamar Jackson holds onto the ball for 15 seconds and finds an open receiver’ type of thing; with Jalen Hurts, it’s because he’s so unbelievably powerful.
He isn’t the most agile guy, and he thrives when he’s getting north and south. That includes, but is not limited to, the Tush Push. We’ve seen a bunch of other teams bastardize the Brotherly shove, and fail because they don’t have Jalen Hurts. Then, in his actual runs and scrambles, there's a feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for him to turn upfield. That feeling is there because you know that once he does, he’s getting the yards he wants; that’s him being a playmaker.
He also has a beautiful deep ball. His ability to hit a deep shot is not up for discussion. The part that should be talked about, but almost never is, is how he helps the entire team by taking over games.
Jalen Hurts controls the game
Take the Cleveland Browns: they have a really, really good defense, but they’re always on the field because their quarterback(s) stink. That makes everything worse for them, and they’re consistently ineffective. That’s obviously the other side of the spectrum from what the Eagles have going on, but that kind of fatigue-driven terrible defense was almost completely absent from the Eagles' 2024 season, and a lot of it was because of Jalen Hurts.
The proof is in the Week 15 game against the Steelers and the Week 16 game against the Commanders.
In Week 15, the Eagles ended the game with a 21-play, 88-yard drive that took 10 and a half minutes. On that drive, Hurts converted on a third-and-six and a second-and-14. He also turned a third-and-13 into a fourth-and-one, turned a second-and-20 into a third-and-one, and Tush Pushed both of those for first downs. He was in complete control of the game and never let his defense get on the field.
Fast forward one week, and Frankie Luvu’s dirty hit knocks Jalen Hurts out of the game. Kenny Pickett was the guy in charge, and boy, was it ugly. The running game never became anything consistent because there wasn’t the threat of Hurts, and the passing game hit a brick wall. Not only did the defense end up getting worn down, which set up Jayden Daniels for a game-winning drive, but the offense couldn’t close the game out.
In 2022, no one gave Jalen Hurts more MVP votes because of how the team played when he was hurt, and no one is going to give him a better ranking because of how the team played when he was gone in 2024 … even though there was a rematch in the NFC Championship game five weeks later, and he tore the Commanders to itty bitty pieces.
It’s ridiculous that people out there think QB1 is some middle-of-the-road clown. The dude rocks, and he stunts on everybody when he has to. Hurts doesn’t just save it for some dumb late-season Thursday Night game like some other tall fella in Los Angeles; he does it then, and then keeps it rolling in the most important games of the season.