Jalen Hurts holds two weekly press conferences with the media who cover the Eagles, including one session immediately after each game, and they offer an insight into the man who would be King of Philadelphia. Hurts does not make any jokes during his press conferences. He doesn’t engage in playful give-and-take with any of the beat writers or TV reporters. We threaten to feed him “rat poison,” after all, and there is no joshing to be done with someone you perceive will do you harm.
No, there is no levity of any kind. There is only Hurts’ intense humorlessness and seriousness as he delivers each of his answers, balancing praise of his teammates against his reluctance to say anything too revealing. He could say more, if he chose to, but he doesn’t.
What those interactions do reveal is Hurts’ ability to be disciplined in a setting in which it would be easy for him not to be disciplined. His words are considered, and he is in control at all times. He isn’t glib. He doesn’t display any outward anger. He measures what he is about to say or do before he says or does it. No one has yet listened to or walked away from a Jalen Hurts media availability and remarked, Can you believe he said that?
Sometimes a press conference is just a press conference, but in Hurts’ case, it is something more. It’s an example of a valuable and underrated quality he possesses, one that has helped the Eagles win their first five games this season, one that stood out Sunday in their 20-17 victory over the Arizona Cardinals. That sense of self-control that Hurts projects whenever he’s standing at a lectern or sitting behind a microphone extends to the field, too. He has not been careless or reckless in his play. He has thrown just two interceptions. His INT percentage, 1.3, is tied for fifth-best in the NFL. He has fumbled just twice and didn’t lose either one. There are 11 quarterbacks who have fumbled four times or more already this season. He is a coach’s son, and so far, it shows.
The most encouraging part of this trend for the Eagles, of course, is that Hurts has protected the ball while still producing big plays. He is averaging 8.5 yards per passing attempt, the second-highest mark in the league. But in the name of being daring, a quarterback often makes the kinds of mistakes that hurt his team at best and cripple it at worst. Hurts isn’t making those mistakes. When he has made a poor decision or throw this season — his pick-six interception last week against the Jaguars, for instance, or Jalen Thompson’s near-interception Sunday — it has been surprising for its rarity. Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson, Josh Allen: All of them have had their passes intercepted at a higher rate than Hurts. Derek Carr, Tua Tagovailoa, Carson Wentz, Matthew Stafford, Matt Ryan: All of them have interception rates that are at least twice as high as Hurts’.
Sunday was the latest and starkest example of the benefits of Hurts’ combination of cautious and assertiveness, and the reason that the example was so stark is that the game was so close. Its outcome came down to a play here, a play there, and the two most consequential sequences demonstrated the contrast between Hurts and Arizona’s Kyle Murray. With 4½ minutes left, on third-and-11 from the Cardinals’ 36-yard line, Hurts called an audible, dialing up a quick throw to counteract a blitz, and found Dallas Goedert for 16 yards. The first down led to Cameron Dicker’s go-ahead field goal.
As calm and commanding as Hurts was, Murray was frenetic on the Cardinals’ final possession — reacting, not anticipating. He had Zach Ertz wide open for a long gain and launched a pass so far over Ertz’s head that it appeared Murray was throwing the ball away to stop the clock. That error was merely a prelude, of course, to his bigger gaffe: his decision on a second-and-10 scramble, with the Cardinals out of timeouts, to start his give-up slide a yard short of the first-down marker. Had Murray made certain he got a new set of downs — and he could have made certain — the Cardinals would’ve had another shot to score a winning touchdown. Instead, they spiked the ball, settled for a field goal, and watched Matt Ammendola’s kick sail wide of the right upright.
“I personally have mixed emotions about the game itself,” Hurts said afterward. “But we found a way. We found a way.”
Why were his emotions mixed?
“As a competitor,” he said, “when you have the ball in your hands at the end of a game, you want to take advantage of it and not give the opposition an opportunity to win the game, tie the game, whatever it is. And I don’t look at anybody else but myself. I look in the mirror and look at myself and ask myself, ‘What could I have done more not to put the team in this position toward the end of the game? How could I have gotten us in the end zone?’”
A commendable sentiment. Jalen Hurts wanted to win his team the game. But he did the next-best thing, and he has been doing it throughout the Eagles’ five perfect weeks. He made sure he didn’t lose it.
