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Why Sirianni may be looking at Hurts’ performance differently than everyone else
Despite a slow start and avoidable turnovers, Jalen Hurts showed his ability to bounce back and get the job done.
Nick Sirianni spoke on Jalen Hurts’ performance against the Packers on Monday afternnoon.
If someone told you Jalen Hurts would throw two touchdown passes, engineer three 70-yard TD drives, pass for nearly 300 yards, put up 34 points against a defense that was top-10 in 2023 and rally the Eagles to a win 5,000 miles from home in a game where they trailed four separate times, you’d probably be OK with that.
Hurts really did do some good things Friday night in the season opener, but they were to a great extent overshadowed by a couple inexplicable mistakes.
He threw two interceptions that weren’t the result of incredible defensive plays but simply poor decisions, and he could have thrown two more.
But in his 52nd career start he did enough good things to help the Eagles win a very difficult season opener against a team that was about a minute from the NFC Championship Game last year.
Nick Sirianni pointed to Hurts’ work on the Eagles’ last drive, which took 7 ½ minutes off the clock, resulted in a short Jake Elliott field goal and gave the Packers only 22 seconds to go the length of the field and try to score a game-winning touchdown.
Hurts converted two 2nd-and-longs to DeVonta Smith for first downs on the pivotal drive and also had a clutch eight-yard first-down scramble on a 2nd-and-8.
The interceptions were bad, but Hurts’ ability to bounce back from those sort of mistakes is impressive.
“Yeah, he’s definitely going to want plays back,” Sirianni said. “We all do. He was solely in the moment of, ‘We have a two-point lead, how do we go close this game?’
“So Jalen, that throw on the shallow to Smitty on the second down earlier in that drive and then the slant, he made just really good plays there on both those second downs to get those first downs and continue that drive.
“We gave them the ball back with (22) seconds left down five points with no timeouts. That’s pretty tough to do. I know as an offensive coach you look at that, like, ‘Man, it is going to be really hard to score a touchdown.’”
The first four times Hurts dropped back to throw Friday, he had an incompletion, an interception deep in Eagles territory, a one-yard completion to Dallas Goedert and then a fumble when Cam Jurgens snapped the ball before Hurts was expecting it.
When the Eagles came out for their third offensive possession late in the first quarter, Hurts had more turnovers than passing yards, the Packers had kicked two field goals and the Eagles had been outgained 59 to negative-1.
That’s a lot to overcome, but Hurts did and that’s a big reason the Eagles are 1-0 for the fourth straight season.
“That was something I saw from the entire team, the mental toughness to be able to push through the adversities we were going to see,” Sirianni said. “There will be adversity all season. It’s going to be within games, it’s going to be week to week, it’s going to be within practice. But it is so critical they can focus their attention on the next drive and the next play, and Jalen did an unbelievable job of that that (and) really helped us seal that victory.
“Without that dog mentality, without that mental toughness that Jalen had, it would’ve been hard to close that game out. We couldn’t have started that game any worse either. We were down 6-0. How about the mental toughness of the defense to respond with a short field to stop them for six points? How about the mental toughness of Jalen to put us up 7-6 when we couldn’t have had a worse first quarter to start our season as an offense?”
Hurts was one of only two NFL QBs to throw for 275 yards with two touchdowns in Week 1. The other was Baker Mayfield in the Bucs’ win over Washington. The Eagles were the only NFL team with five scoring drives of at least 60 yards in Week 1. And Hurts improved to 34-14 since becoming the Eagles’ full-time starter on opening-day in 2021. Only Patrick Mahomes (37) and Josh Allen (36) have more wins.
So, yeah, moments of ugliness that Hurts has to fix. But if you look a little deeper, some encouraging moments as well.
“I really believe that you get what you preach, and we talk about that a lot, to be in that mindset of having a clear mind to play the next play,” Sirianni said. “The guys did that. It’s a tribute to the character of the guys we have on this football team to be able to do that in the first game of the season in front of the entire world to see.”
