It was pretty early on a Sunday morning in late October, and the Broad Street subway line was packed with fans heading down to Lincoln Financial Field in South Philadelphia for the Eagles’ game against their cross-state cousins, the Pittsburgh Steelers. Some people were clutching coffee cups; others were throwing back beers despite it being well before noon. Such is the custom. On the whole, the vibes were good—then a man suddenly stood up and shouted “Oh, my God.” Then he did it again and pulled something from his pocket. That got everyone’s attention.
“The Eagles and Jalen Hurts are gonna beat them Steelers,” he screamed while recording the reaction on his phone. The crowd laughed and roared, and he repeated the declaration again. Actually, that’s the anodyne version, minus the spicier language. But you get the idea. The assembly loved it. And as it turned out, the SEPTA hype man and videographer was right—the Eagles and Jalen Hurts did beat them Steelers that day. Didn’t just beat them, but pummeled them from the first to the last to win their seventh straight game and remain the NFL’s only undefeated team.
That had a lot to do with Hurts, who was spectacular that afternoon, just as the subway prophecy foretold. Hurts threw four touchdowns of 25 yards or more—three to A.J. Brown (which hilariously led to a next-day drug test) and another to Zach Pascal. The Eagles were ahead so comfortably that Hurts got much of the fourth quarter off. The effort marked the team’s 10th straight regular-season victory, which set a franchise record and represents the longest active streak in the NFL. To say the Eagles and their quarterback have had a hot start to the season would be a gross understatement, though Hurts almost certainly wouldn’t acknowledge the obvious.
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After thumping the Steelers, reporters credited Hurts with a killer afternoon using the kind of complimentary language that is … let’s call it rare in Philadelphia. And yet Hurts ticked off the plays he missed and the sacks he took with photographic recall. He said he felt like he “could have done more” in a game that was never in doubt.
“There’s always something,” Hurts said. He had on an olive jacket stamped with “Public Enemy” across the front and a baseball cap pulled low. He spoke as he generally does—in a sort of soft and serious monotone. “There’s always something. Enough is never enough. We strive for something that we may never get. But we continue to go chase it.”
They won that game by more than three touchdowns.
A few days later, the Birds beat the Texans on the road to keep their record unblemished. Hurts is from Houston. People figured he’d be pretty pumped to play in front of his family and friends. He was asked about that at the Eagles practice facility in the runup to the game. You must be excited. Anything you plan to do or eat while you’re back home?
“No,” Hurts said with the same soft and serious voice. “It’s a business trip.”
That business trip got them to 8–0. The earnestness frankly sounded like a bit much—this quarterback who is on top of the football world seemingly not allowing himself to enjoy the view—but it’s evidently not unusual. Eagles coach Nick Sirianni explained it as Hurts simply refusing to be subject to the regular ups and downs of a football season. But someone familiar with the team dynamic said there was something more to the quarterback’s approach. The person reminded me of the viral video of Hurts squatting an obscene 600 pounds while at Oklahoma as a way of establishing himself after transferring. It isn’t just that Hurts is the alpha in the locker room—he is, but he also wants everyone to know it.
That’s hard to miss these days given how he’s playing. Heading into Week 10, Hurts had more rushing touchdowns than any other quarterback, was second in touchdown to interception ratio, second in passer rating, sixth in rushing yards among quarterbacks, tenth in passing yards and sixth in QBR and completion percentage. We could go on. Contrast that with last season, when the Eagles ended a limp campaign with an ugly first-round playoff loss to the Buccaneers in a game that left everyone questioning whether Hurts could be the long-term starter or whether general manager Howie Roseman might be better served grabbing a quarterback in the draft or hunting for one in a trade during the offseason. After almost everyone in town was eager for the Birds to throw Carson Wentz overboard and install Hurts as the main man, it felt like that same sentiment to move on to the next guy was suddenly being applied to Hurts himself. Hurts is only 24 years old, but his future was very much in doubt.
“The playoff game, he was a mess,” Eagles legend Mike Quick told me. The former wideout and long-time radio color analyst for the Birds is an institution. He had his doubts about Hurts like a lot of people. And like a lot of people, he doesn’t anymore. “Part of it, you have to give Tampa credit in the way they played him. But he wasn’t ready then. Now he’s ready.”
Quick called Hurts’s progression from that playoff loss to this season a “quantum leap,” which could also be used to describe the shift in the overarching attitude toward him by locals. As Adam Sandler hilariously and sarcastically quipped in Hustle, “Philadelphia sports fans are calm, reasonable people.” A year ago the list of Hurts haters would have been long and included most of my friends and family and pretty much everyone who calls sports talk radio, which has always been Philly’s version of an unhinged therapy support group. All that negativity and uncertainty has since vanished. On the morning after the Pittsburgh win, a host on 94.1 WIP-FM noted that “the anti-Hurts faction” that dominated the airwaves last season had faded completely, while a caller named Arson Arnie—that’s the kind of local flair you get in Philly—summed it up perfectly: “Anyone who wants to question whether Hurts should be the Eagles’ quarterback, I question, should he be MVP?” (That might sound hyperbolic, until you consider that certain oddsmakers agree.)
As a native and a longtime journalist in that city, I cannot stress how unusual it is for the town to put away the torches and pitchforks and throw open its arms for hugs. Hugging happens, just not usually after the fans and media have done a fair amount of kicking while someone was down. How Hurts has handled all that might be his biggest accomplishment of all.
“I’ve been through a ton of different things and a ton of different experiences,” Hurts said when I asked him about dealing with the pressure of playing this particular position in this particular city. “I’ve always felt like I was born for the storm.”
The story arc here is pretty remarkable. Hurts was elevated from understudy to leading man, initially received fairly tepid feedback and looked like he might have his act canceled like so many before him. Now he’s not only commanding the spotlight, but he’s receiving almost universal critical acclaim in a place that’s typically reluctant to issue rave reviews.
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Philly loves a backup quarterback. It’s always been that way. Considering the franchise has won one Super Bowl in its history, it’s been rare that the starter has lived up to often lofty demands.
The brief provincial backstory: A not-insignificant portion of Philly’s fans wanted Ron Jaworski replaced with Randall Cunningham way back when. Then they wanted Cunningham replaced with Jim McMahon. They wanted Doug Pederson replaced with Donovan McNabb, and eventually they wanted McNabb replaced with a whole host of people, including Kevin Kolb. Then they wanted Kolb replaced with Michael Vick. It’s gone on like that pretty much forever.
“Me for Kolb. Nick Foles for me. They embrace the backup,” Michael Vick said with a laugh when I recently asked him about Philly’s wandering eye. “The pressure to perform there is so intense. The crowd is going to boo you if you don’t get it going. As a backup, you prepare hard so that when you step in, you don’t get booed.”
Vick wasn’t surprised that, like so many other times in the organization’s history, the fan base eventually clamored for Wentz to be swapped out for Hurts. Neither was Quick, who said, “Oh, yeah, that had to happen.” But what makes this iteration of Eagles quarterback carousel different is that Hurts appears to have stopped the merry-go-round from spinning. It probably helps that for the first time since he was in high school, Hurts has gotten more than a season playing in the same offensive system with the same head coach and offensive coordinator.
“It’s huge. You come to training camp after a year in the system, and it’s the same system. You’re not learning another language, which is what learning a new system is like,” Jaworski says. Like so many other people in Philly, Jaws—more local flair—said he’s had any long-term concerns about Hurts “wiped out” because of the quarterback’s ability to navigate the pressure and growing pains that come with being elevated to the Eagles starter. Jaworski, who’d know about those pains pretty well, said Hurts’s “ability to bounce back from setbacks is remarkable.”
“It’s a tough business,” Jaworski says. “You’re going to be humiliated at times. You’re going to be humbled at times. And how you handle that really determines how far you go as an NFL quarterback. And so far he’s been just phenomenal at handling the setbacks he’s been issued.”
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Those setbacks go back to college. Hurts essentially lost his starting job at Alabama during halftime of the national championship game following the 2017 season. He had to watch his replacement, Tua Tagovailoa, lead the Tide to a title in an overtime win against SEC rival Georgia. Then Hurts had to spend his junior season coming off the bench. But where most other pro prospects would have thrown a fit, Hurts took the demotion in stride. He then transferred to Oklahoma and excelled, finishing second in Heisman voting as a senior. Then after being drafted in the second round by the Eagles and usurping Wentz as the starter, it looked like at least even money that the organization would look to swap Hurts out for someone else—if not before this season, then during it. That’s how shaky his hold on the position was following that playoff loss to the Buccaneers. Instead, Hurts locked down his role as the main man by exceeding everyone’s expectations this season, except maybe his own. He called the setbacks “formative experiences.”
“I had a little bit of a reflection the other day,” Hurts says. “When you tell someone to be patient ... Be patient; it’s coming. Be patient, your play is coming. Be patient, whatever. I’m a living testimony to that.”
Of course that is often easier to say than do, especially in a league with an only slightly tongue-in-cheek acronym: Not For Long. Players often don’t have the opportunity to be patient because franchises frequently aren’t, particularly with quarterbacks. It certainly helped, then, that Hurts came with one built-in advantage that incentivized the Eagles to give him more time to develop: He’s cheap. Hurts is in the third year of a four-year rookie deal and only counts $1.6 million against the team’s cap. That allowed Roseman the luxury of allocating funds to other areas, like trading for Brown and signing him to a four-year, $100 million contract. Where other teams are weighed down by big-money quarterbacks, the Eagles had the financial flexibility to use the extra cap room to improve the roster in other areas, grabbing defensive backs C.J. Gardner-Johnson and James Bradberry, as well as linebackers Kyzir White and Haason Reddick during the offseason. That’s a big deal, and it’s gone a long way to pushing the Eagles to the top of the football food chain so far. There’s a symbiosis to it—Hurts helping the Eagles upgrade the team and the upgraded team helping Hurts level up in the process.
“They got rid of [Jalen] Reagor,” Vick says. “Reagor was a decent player. You can make it work with him. But they went and got A.J. Brown. Now, that’s a significant upgrade when you look at numbers and everything. He can make Jalen look great. And then on the defensive side of the ball, they add James Bradberry as the corner opposite of [Darius] Slay. And they get Gardner-Johnson from New Orleans. And now the defense is better. Now they’ve got a better team. Now Jalen just has to do his job—get it to A.J., get it to DeVonta [Smith], hand it off, let the defense play defense. Now you’ve got a recipe for winning. And they see that. They see that if we do that week in and week out, we win.”
That’s all they’ve done so far, which is the surest and fastest way to endear yourself to the Philly faithful. It should be noted, though, that Hurts scored some real “Philly guy” points last season for how he reacted when a railing collapsed following a game against Washington at FedExField, spilling Eagles fans down onto the concrete below. Hurts wrote a letter to the NFL inquiring about what follow-up actions would be taken regarding the incident and what safeguards would be implemented to avoid it happening again. In the immediate aftermath, he also stuck around to check on the fans who fell and see that they weren’t seriously injured. Just acting like a human being to other human beings goes a long way. Between moments like that and a season like this, when he’s asserting himself as one of the very best at his position, it’s no wonder that all the detractors have disappeared and his popularity has skyrocketed. Before the Sixers played the Spurs in October, Hurts was the pregame bell ringer—something that’s considered one of the utmost honors in town. The crowd absolutely lost it when Hurts came out, just as they do each game when he runs out of the tunnel and they announce his name at the Linc. As stars go, he couldn’t be shining any brighter at the moment.
Which does not mean that Hurts has paused for a moment to consider his good fortunes and how different things have lately been for him. On the contrary. When he was prompted on the subject ahead of the Texans game, he responded by talking about “an uphill climb,” added “I honestly feel like there is no arrival,” and insisted he’ll never say “I’ve arrived.” To Hurts, “there’s only the journey.” Which, to repeat, is awfully earnest. Sometimes it seems like he’s gripping the wheel a bit tight. Then again, the journey has been pretty impressive so far, and the destination he’s pointed the Eagles toward looks promising.
