CHICAGO — Jalen Hurts had scrambled to his right toward the sideline, had taken a step out of bounds, had taken a hellacious hit from Bears linebacker D’Marco Jackson, and there Hurts was now, sprinting back to the Eagles’ huddle, making sure the world knew that he believed he was good to go.
The Eagles were moving, at the Bears’ 15-yard line midway through the second quarter, in striking distance of a tying touchdown. But the concussion spotter assigned to Monday night’s game at Soldier Field has a job to do, too, and it’s an important one, and he signaled to the officials that Hurts had to spend time getting his head checked in the medical tent.
What happened over the next four plays and several minutes wasn’t necessarily the turning point in the Eagles’ 27-7 loss, but it symbolized their night as perfectly as any sequence could. Throughout training camp and the preseason, the competition between Andy Dalton and Tanner McKee for the team’s No. 2 quarterback spot was nothing more than a battle between two bad choices. Then Dalton replaced Hurts and showed just how bad. After Saquon Barkley ripped off a 14-yard run to the Bears’ 1-yard-line, he was stuffed twice, and on third down from the shotgun, Dalton did the one thing he couldn’t do: He turned the ball over, throwing a horrible interception to the Bears’ Dillon Thieneman.
Maybe, even if the Eagles get in the end zone or just settle for a field goal there, nothing else changes about a game that they never looked ready to play. Maybe Ben Johnson stays one step ahead of Vic Fangio. Maybe Case Keenum — 38-year-old Case Keenum, playing in his first NFL game in nearly three years — keeps carving up the Eagles’ defense. Maybe that defense keeps missing tackles and breaking down in coverage. Maybe Sean Mannion keeps calling screen passes that don’t work, that lose yardage, and stall drives. Maybe the rest of Monday night unfolds exactly as it did, with Hurts throwing his own awful interception late in the third quarter, with Johnson showing that he doesn’t need Caleb Williams at quarterback to outclass Fangio for the second time in 10 months.
But then, that’s the twisted game that you can play with a team like the one the Eagles have been through their first three games. You can what-if just about any moment, because there are so many moments in which they are making silly, inexcusable mistakes. They committed 10 penalties Monday. They left Bears wide receiver Kalif Raymond wide-open in the middle of the field and watched him dash for a 41-yard touchdown. They’re such a long way from the smart, buttoned-up team that head coach Nick Sirianni forever insists he expects them to be.
Go back to that pivotal point when Hurts left the game, Dalton entered it, and everything went to hell. Surely thousands of Eagles fans started screaming at their television screens when they saw that the trainers and doctors were examining Hurts. Sorry, everyone: It was the right thing to do. It doesn’t matter that Hurts appeared to be fresh and fine not long after Jackson hit him and said after the game that he had suffered no ill effects. Most NFL players in the same situation would have reacted exactly the same way he did, assuming they could. They’d want to stay on the field, and they’d hide any symptoms, and concussion spotters can’t take the chance of having players fool them and try to play through head trauma.
Per NFL rules as of 2015, a spotter can stop a game when a player “displays obvious signs of disorientation or is clearly unstable” and “is attempting to remain in the game and not be attended to by the club’s medical or athletic training staff.” Watch the play again. After Jackson levels him, Hurts remains prone on the ground for two full seconds, his legs and feet kicking slightly. It would be understandable if, based on the hit’s immediate aftermath, the spotter determined that Hurts was disoriented.
Sirianni, in theory, could have called a timeout to stall, to buy time for Hurts to clear the concussion protocol, except he said he had no idea what Hurts’ condition was and when he might be ready to return, if he could return at all. “I think that’s the right way to go about it,” he said. “The health of the player is the most important thing.” Besides, the problem wasn’t that Hurts was no longer in the game. The problem was that the Eagles, Dalton specifically, screwed up without him.
Dalton is 38, in his 16th NFL season. He is supposed to be experienced and savvy enough not to force a throw to a receiver, Dontayvion Wicks, who was blanketed in the back of the end zone. A coach should be able to count on a veteran backup to be smart in that situation, and the Eagles paid dearly for Dalton’s violation of that trust.
“I can’t put the team in that situation,” Dalton said. “Costly decision.”
The lasting price of that incompetence, just one example of so many Monday night, remains to be seen. The Eagles are 2-1, sure, but so far they haven’t been the team anyone expected them to be. They are asking so much of Hurts, perhaps too much. Their defense hasn’t been close to the shutdown unit it was presumed to be. And the Los Angeles Rams, 1-2 and dangerous, are ahead on Sunday. The Eagles had better wise up before then, because their leader and their self-image took some major hits Monday night, and right now, everyone is wondering what kind of team they really are.
