NASHVILLE — The name on Jalen Hurts’ mind wasn’t the one you might’ve expected.
An hour after the Eagles quarterback uploaded the latest clip to his resumé tape with a 3-yard game-winning touchdown pass to Darius Cooper to lead the Eagles to a 24-20 win over the Titans on Sunday, he settled into a chair in a cramped interview room and spoke like a man who felt like he’d proven something. Hurts had spent the previous several days aware that his quarterbacking abilities had once again become grist for the NFL’s talk show circuit. The genesis of the debate — this time, at least — was a comment by Titans star defensive tackle Jeffery Simmons, who said that the key to beating the Eagles was to “make Jalen Hurts be a quarterback.” Tennessee achieved that objective, limiting Hurts to 16 yards on five mostly inconsequential carries. The quarterbacking they wanted to force proved lethal.
Yet it wasn’t Simmons who was at the forefront of Hurts’ mind. Though he admitted he’d heard the lineman’s comment, and though he strongly implied that he’d been motivated by the ostensible slight, it was Titans head coach Robert Saleh who drew a couple of unprompted mentions from Hurts in the wake of the wild win.
“It felt good to get him,” Hurts said. “He’s posed some great challenges, but I kind of checked that off.”
It was an interesting admission. One of the more undercovered story lines leading up to the game was the track record of success that Saleh’s defenses have had against the Eagles during Hurts’ tenure as QB1. Most notable was Saleh’s architecting of the 49ers’ wild-card win at Lincoln Financial Field last January, when his injury-ravaged unit limited Hurts to 168 yards on 20-of-35 passing. But Saleh was also at the scene of the crime in Week 6 of 2023, when the Jets picked Hurts off three times en route to a 20-14 upset win, a performance that prompted the Packers to enlist him as a consultant the following season as they were preparing to face the Eagles in the playoffs.
“Coach Saleh is always known for having a really good front, and it starts with Jeffery Simmons in the middle, and the disruption he brings,” Hurts said. “He was definitely disruptive and I think for the most part we managed it well. A lot to learn from. A lot to build forward on.”
Here, it seemed, was the actual window into Hurts’ competitive psyche on a Sunday afternoon that saw him overcome two interceptions and will the Eagles down the field on a masterful nine-play, 65-yard scoring drive after the Titans had taken a 20-17 lead with 1 minute, 56 seconds remaining. While everyone else focused on Simmons, and while Hurts happily played his part in that game, he drew a much deeper pregame motivation from the memory of his failures. Sure, Sunday’s game was a chance to stick it to Simmons and by extension to those who share his sentiments. But it was much more substantively an opportunity to deploy the lessons he’d learned in his previous go-rounds against a defensive scheme the Titans now featured under Saleh as their first-year head coach. As Hurts himself might say, there is no motivator as powerful as an opportunity to show growth.
Both he and the Eagles showed it on Sunday, albeit in an unconventional manner. They spent most of the first half looking every bit the superior team they were believed to be. Hurts was remarkably calm, poised and accurate with the football while dealing with a patchwork interior offensive line and dysfunctional running game amid a suffocating blanket of heat and humidity amplified by the artificial turf at Nissan Stadium. The Eagles entered halftime having run 40 plays: 15, 11 and 14 on three possessions covering 210 yards. That they led 14-10 rather than 21-3 was a function entirely of Hurts’ lone miscue: an end zone interception that Titans safety Amani Hooker returned 92 yards to set up a touchdown.
It would be easy to focus on the Eagles’ second half struggles, when Hurts was off-target on a number of big throws and thus left the Eagles at the mercy of their ineffective running game and a startlingly vulnerable defense. Except, those things ultimately set the stage for two of the finest minutes of Hurts’ career.
Rarely will you see a quarterback make a more consequential series of throws than the ones Hurts made while marching the Eagles 65 yards down the field. The headline, highlight, and game-ender was a 3-yard toss to Cooper in the back of the end zone with 9 seconds left. It was also a formality by that point. On the previous play, Hurts had hit DeVonta Smith with a 19-yard throw to convert a third-and-6. Two plays before that, he somehow managed to muscle himself outside of the tackle box and throw an incompletion while wrapped up by Titans defensive end Jacob Martin for what would have been a significant loss to push the Eagles back toward the fringe of field-goal territory.
“Huge,” was how left tackle Jordan Mailata described that moment.
Just as huge was Hurts’ 20-yard completion to Dontayvion Wicks on third-and-6 at the beginning of the drive.
Take away any one of these moments, and the Eagles would have been trying to explain the inexplicable instead of shrugging off another flawed victory over a vastly inferior team.
Instead, we can focus on that which is perfectly explicable.
“He didn’t flinch,” Smith said.
The best thing you can say about Hurts, the highest compliment you can give him, is that he has shown us that we should expect everything that we saw in the closing minutes on Sunday. The calm, the rhythm, the blankness of mind. Apart from his self-evident physical gifts, his greatest competitive advantage has always been a near-total self belief that prevails regardless of circumstance. He has shown it time and again at every level of football, from Alabama to Oklahoma to the second round of the NFL draft to the questions that seem to swirl around his future on a weekly basis, with Simmons’ comment as the most recent example.
“It’s a sense of belief,“ Mailata said. ”It’s more like a knowing. I know he’s going to go down and lead us, I know he’s going to make the right reads, I know he’s going to make the right throws.”
More often than not, the talent prevails. The poise prevails. The unflinching self-belief prevails.
You can say a lot of things about Hurts. The list starts with those three truths.
