Every quarterback is a system quarterback.
No matter how you want to divide the performance of a quarterback in and around the system he’s in, and the players around him, no quarterback just goes out there and throws the ball around with no thought to all of those things. Ask Tom Brady, who has seen dips in performance when the Buccaneers go away from play-action and pre-snap motion over the last three seasons, about that.
When we say “system quarterback,” however, we generally use it in a pejorative sense, and it means that the quarterback in question relies too much on those schemes and the players around him to succeed. That quarterback is not “elite,” because he couldn’t be as successful in another situation, and another quarterback would be just about as successful in that same environment.
This is now what Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts faces. Despite a season in which he’s completed 67.3% of his passes for 8.2 yards per attempt, 22 touchdowns, and five interceptions, Hurts has been lumped into the “system quarterback” bin by a lot of people.
“Is it Hurts or the team?”
“It’s system and team”
-Cowboys DE Micah Parsons not believing in Jalen Hurts MVP? 🤔
Eagles-Cowboys in 10 days
🎥 VonCast pic.twitter.com/AkSCjIMXNl
— John Clark (@JClarkNBCS) December 14, 2022
Chris Simms on Hurts being MVP front-runner: “They have the best O-Line in football, 2nd best WR duo, a great TE.. There’s just no way he’s more valuable than Mahomes, Allen, or Burrow, no way. If Minshew is in, the #Eagles are still damn good. I’m sorry.” pic.twitter.com/B6qfzihrBn
— Eagles Nation X:(13-1) (@PHLEaglesNation) December 15, 2022
Hurts does benefit from the NFL’s best offensive line, and the addition via trade of former Tennessee Titans receiver A.J. Brown has been franchise-altering. But when you look at how Hurts has taken command of the Eagles’ offense, both as a thrower and as a runner, the idea that he’s a system guy who can’t transcend anything is a bit ridiculous.
Unfortunately, the Eagles may be about to find out how well they fare without the 2022 version of their franchise quarterback. Hurts suffered a sprained throwing shoulder in Philadelphia’s 25-20 win over the Chicago Bears last Sunday, and that might mean Gardner Minshew starting for the team in its crucial game against the Dallas Cowboys this Saturday.
“He is one of the toughest guys I know, and he heals fast,” head coach Nick Sirianni said Tuesday of Hurts’ recovery timeline. “He’s a freak. His body is not like – pardon me – yours or mine. I’m shaming myself there a little bit, too. His body is not like ours. He heals fast. He came back fast from his injury last year, and I will not rule him out, will not put a timetable on him, and we’ll see. We’ll see what happens this week.”
It’s clear that his own head coach thinks of Hurts as more than a replaceable cog, and he’s absolutely right. But if you don’t think that Hurts is a legitimate MVP candidate above and beyond what’s around him, the tape tells a very different story.
Continuity makes a difference.
Through his time at Alabama and Oklahoma from 2016-2019, and with the Eagles since 2020, this is the first time since his high school days that Hurts has had the same play-caller two seasons in a row.
“For whatever reason, since I was in college, freshman at Alabama, every year I’ve had a different play caller,” Hurts said in January. “Every year I’ve had all these different changes. I’ve had so much I’ve had to adjust to.
“To have some consistency coming into next year and having coach Sirianni back, having that will do us a huge benefit in every aspect of our game and do us a huge benefit as a football team.”
It’s working very well, and everybody is taking notice.
“I think you see that a lot in his reads, because that’s where it’s going to show up the most because you’re running similar plays that he’s been running for two years,” Sirianni said on December 14, when asked about that new continuity. “He’s seeing different defenses. He’s going to different places with the football based off of what the defense is doing. One of my favorite plays that he made in the game [against the Giants in Week 14] was a four-yard gain to [WR] Zach Pascal. Well, why? Why would that be your favorite play? Because it was designed to go one place with the ball. We actually got the coverage we thought we were going to get, and it didn’t go there because it was just a little cloudy over there. So he, hey, oh, man, they’re probably in the coverage that we thought we were going to play on this one; I’m going to deliver a ball there, eh, looks cloudy, ball to Zach Pascal for a four-yard gain. That’s a sweet play.
“Those are showing you his growth, his development of that, and that’s a play that we’ve been running for a couple years and that he has a lot of reps on and he knows what it’s supposed to look like; when it’s not looking that way, he moves on. I think that’s a really good example of that, and that’s one of the plays we showed in the team meeting today of just really good quarterback play.”
Another reason Sirianni probably liked this play is that it was a conversion on second-and-1. The Giants were playing Cover-6 (Cover-2 to the boundary and Cover-4 to the field), and as there was 9″40 left in the first quarter, Hurts didn’t have to press for the completion. The idea here was to take the profit, and that’s what he did.
After the Giants game, Eagles cornerback Darius Slay mentioned that he was inspired to switch to receiver so that he could catch passes from Hurts. The catalyst for this was the out route Hurts threw to receiver Quez Watkins with 1:40 left in the first quarter.
“The best throw today was the out route to Quez,” Slay said. “On the blitz, off the back foot… it was a DOT. That’s how you do it in [Madden] 2k. I don’t know if you’ve played 2k, but you throw it to the corner, hit the corner 3 DOT? He hit a DOT today. I was like, I wanna go to receiver because I know [Hurts] can get me the ball anytime now. I’m almost retired from this DB [explative] and I’m going to receiver, because I know I’m going for fityhunred [1,500 yards].
“I’m calling Coach tonight. We having a full conversation tonight. ‘Coach, I wanna be a receiver because I know I’ll get 1,500 yards. In five games.”
Well, here’s the throw that inspired Slay. The Eagles had third-and-4 at their own 15-yard line, the Giants were blitzing (as is their wont under defensive coordinator Wink Martindale), and Hurts handled the cross-dog pressure and the free rush from safety Tony Jefferson as if he was throwing out of 7-on-7..
On December 13, offensive coordinator Shane Steichen pointed to another throw against the Giants which turned his head.
“It was just a great throw by him,” Steichen first said of the Watkins out route. “And then the other one that I thought was awesome was that first third down of the game, the drive to [WR] DeVonta [Smith], the quick out. He threw that ball with such great anticipation and accuracy. The guy was right on his back hip, and he let that thing go before DeVonta broke out, and it hit him right there. That was a huge play in the game.”
It was, and it was also an impressive throw. The Eagles had third-and-6 from the New York 38-yard line with 8:08 left in the first half. The Giants were playing Cover-1, and sending a five-man pressure because Wink Martindale is Wink Martindale. The guy Steichen referred to who was right on Smith’s back hip was cornerback Fabian Moreau, and Hurts zinged the ball to where his receiver could get it, and the defender could not.
Offensive continuity has turned Hurts into the type of quarterback that coaches and teammates can’t stop raving about. System quarterbacks generally don’t get that action.
Creating big plays outside the system.
If we’re going to posit that Hurts isn’t a system quarterback, we’ll need to show examples of his ability to create big-time plays as a thrower and as a runner outside of the structure of the offense. Fortunately, Hurts has a lot of work to help us prove our case.
We’ll start with this 21-yard completion to DeVonta Smith against the Chicago Bears on Sunday. The Eagles had third-and-3 at their own 39-yard line with 7:47 left in the first quarter, and Hurts was facing a compressed pocket from the Bears’ four-man rush and double stunts. So, he rolled to his left, which gave Smith the go-ahead to employ scramble rules. Smith did this by turning cornerback Jaylon Jones inside out on his way to the boundary, but the star of this play was Hurts. When you can square your shoulders to the target on the run, against your own momentum, and feather a perfect timing pass downfield into a tight window… well, this isn’t how the Eagles drew it up. This is what Hurts did on his own.
Back to the Giants in Week 14, and this time, we’re looking at a 41-ayrd touchdown pass to DeVonta Smith with 12:14 left in the first half. Again, Big Blue is blitzing — this time with a five-man pressure from a six-man front with Cover-1 on the back side. Hurts faced pressure up the middle from nose tackle Dexter Lawrence, but he stands in the pocket and delivers an absolute dart to Smith, 25 air yards downfield, with safety Julian Love late to the party. This is a schemed play, of course, but it’s what Hurts does when under pressure that makes it special.
For all the legitimate talk about Philadelphia’s offensive line this season, Hurts had been pressured on 30.2% of his dropbacks this season, and when pressured, he’s completed 45 of 99 passes for 555 yards, four touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 72.6. Against five or more pass-rushers this season, Hurts had completed 75 of 124 passes for 890 yards, seven touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 97.8.
So, we are not dealing with a quarterback who’s utterly reliant on excellent protection to succeed. In addition, there’s what Hurts does as a runner — both on designed runs and scrambles — that makes him even more of a system-transcendent cheat code.
Winning as a runner.
Hurts’ abilities as a runner allow Sirianni and Steichen to tie the run game and the passing game together in some interesting and novel ways. The Eagles are by far the NFL’s most effective team when running out of passing personnel, and this is particularly true when they’re lined up in 11 personnel — one running back, one tight end, and three receivers. They have 279 rushing attempts out of 11 personnel this season for a league-high 1.511 yards, 5.7 yards per carry, and a league-high 16 touchdowns. Hurts has 94 of those carries for 529 yards, 5.6 yards per carry, and a league-high eight touchdowns.
Against the Green Bay Packers in Week 12, Hurts ran 15 times out of 11 for 116 yards, which made him the NFL’s most productive runner out of 11 that week, regardless of position. I would count just four of those runs as quarterback scrambles; the Eagles have a nice package of designed run concepts for their young quarterback.
On this 28-yard Hurts run with 12:09 left in the first quarter, and the Eagles with third-and-6 at the Green Bay 34-yard line, Philly tricky with its pre-snap look. It was a 2×2 set with running back Kenneth Gainwell motioning from the backfield to the flat, and the Packers showing Cover-1 (single-high man) with their response. Gainwell’s motion took Barnes out of the middle of the formation, and against a light box, Hurts knew what was up.
And this 22-yard touchdown run against the Bears on Sunday, Hurts showed what he’s able to do against a defense that decides to blitz. The Bears were playing Cover-0 (man across with no deep safety), and safety Jaquan Brisker blitzed through the right-side A-gap. Hurts hit the “Easy” button, and just ran right through the left-side A-gap, and into open space.
“You’ll see it when we watch it again,” Bears head coach Matt Eberflus said after the game. “We had two guys in the same gap. Safety is supposed to be in the other gap. We should have had that. That’s unfortunate that that happened.”
They should have had that, but it also shows how Hurts can burn you if you make but one mistake.
Gaining the trust of the team.
Hurts’ third-down throw to De’Vonta Smith against the Bears might have been his best throw of the season. He followed that up on the very nest play with what might been his worst throw of the season — this howler to cornerback Kyler Gordon in which Hurts failed to account for Gordon dropping in coverage.
The interesting part of that play was what Sirianni said about it after the game.
“He controls what he can control. He can’t control a bad play earlier. He moves on to the next play. It’s no surprise. That’s who this guy is. And we’ve seen that over and over again. I’ve mentioned it a thousand times… he has a stone-faced look on his face, and he makes a bad play and he still has that same look it. It doesn’t matter. Like he continues to put himself in the moment and learn from the past and try to repeat the good things and get better from the things he messed up. But he’s completely in the moment, and I think that’s what great players do.”
That’s a coach speaking about a franchise quarterback, not a system quarterback.
“You just never want to waver,” Hurts said of that play, and about when things go wrong in general. “You never want to waver. And I always say, never try and get too high, never get too low. Just try and stay the same. You want to find your way in all of these different moments because they are all teachable moments and they all form what’s to come. So I think I’ll never have a doubt in the outcome of what we want.
“I know what we work for, and I never have a doubt in that. And I want those guys to look me in the eye and know there’s not a doubt; know that with the preparation that we put in together that we’ll find a way. I want them to have that trust in me.
“You look at A.J. Brown stepping up and making big-time plays down the field, Smitty. Everybody showed up — everybody showed up when it was needed. And that’s what the great players and great teams do, and I commend this whole entire team for staying together through everything that we endured today, being able to persevere through it.”
If that’s a system quarterback, there are a lot of other NFL teams who would love to have the Jalen Hurts version.
