Remember when Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts was throwing dimes all over the field, and running all over the field, and people were insisting that with all the talent around him, Hurts was a completely replaceable cog in a system?
Yeah, that’s out the door now.
Hurts has missed the Eagles’ last two games with a shoulder injury he suffered in Philly’s Week 15 win over the Chicago Bears. That was also the last time the Eagles won a game. In losses to the Dallas Cowboys and New Orleans Saints, the Eagles have gone from the NFL’s seemingly automatic one-seed at 13-1, to a 13-3 team that had better win their Week 18 game against the New York Giants if they want to get to the top of the mountain.
This is not a shot at backup quarterback Gardner Minshew — Minshew has done the best he can with his own skill set, but we have now seen what happens to this offense when Hurts isn’t in there, and it ain’t pretty. In last week’s 40-37 loss to the Cowboys, Philly’s offense had just 87 rushing yards on 29 carries. And Minshew’s two interceptions helped to seal the deal for Dallas.
But the obvious loss to this offense with Hurts out is Hurts’ impact on the Eagles’ rushing attack. He had gained 747 yards and scored 13 touchdowns on 156 carries, and that rushing ability allowed the Eagles to hang in 11 personnel (one tight end, one running back, three receivers) personnel at an abnormal rate, choosing to run or pass out of that package with equally abnormal success.
Now, we’re finding out that without Hurts as the epicenter of that run game, the Eagles’ offense starts to look… pretty normal. Minshew is a scrambler, and a pretty good one when he needs to be, but he’s not the guy you want when it’d time to fool a defense with a designed QB Power run on third-and-whatever.
As Hurts showed on this 22-yard touchdown run against the Bears, all it takes is one defender to take the wrong angle (in this case, it was safety Jaquan Brisker, who ran to the wrong A-Gap), and it might just be ballgame.
That’s a designed touchdown run out of passing personnel from your quarterback on third-and-8. Not many quarterbacks on whom you can regularly rely for such things.
Partially because they were down 13-0 in the first half, the Eagles relied less on their rushing attack against the Saints in Sunday’s 20-10 loss. They gained 67 yards on 15 attempts, and Kenneth Gainwell’s 28-yard first half touchdown run was negated by an inexcusably bad holding call on guard Landon Dickerson (take a bow as usual, Jerome Boger), and once again, this was not the run game we expect from this team.
Once again, that was because Jalen Hurts was not in the game.
The Eagles are obviously better when Hurts is on the field, but the extent to which they’re better should have people thinking that Hurts is right in contention for the NFL’s Most Valuable Player award, up there with Patrick Mahomes, and possibly Joe Burrow.
Sometimes, you don’t realize how valuable a player has become until you don’t have him for a while. This is the case for Jalen Hurts, and whether he’s able to play or not in the regular-season finale next Sunday, he’s proven beyond all doubt that he’s a lot more than a product of the system that maintains him.