The arguments that go nowhere are usually the ones that have nowhere else to go. That’s especially true whenever the argument revolves around Jalen Hurts . which is pretty much every Sunday right now. Debating Hurts is like locking yourself in a clothes dryer. You spin around in circles a bunch of times and then walk away hot. It has always been that way with him, even when he was in college. A good question to ask yourself in these sorts of situations: What, specifically, are we arguing about? It’s a question everybody should be asking themselves now that we again find ourselves snowballing down the slippery slopes on Aggregation Mountain. We’ve apparently reached the point in the news take news cycle where everybody needs to register their opinion about Hurts. But, like, to what end? At plenty of points in time, a robust debate about Hurts has been warranted. Should Alabama bench him? Can Oklahoma contend for a title with him? Should the Eagles have drafted him in the second round? Should they start him over Carson Wentz? Can he win a Super Bowl? Should they give him a franchise-level extension? It’s worth noting that the answer to all of these questions has turned out to be an unqualified yes. Few athletes in history have as lengthy and unblemished a track record of exceeding the measuring sticks placed before him. Wherever his career goes from here, he will retire as one of the most unprecedented performers in football history. And yet . There Hurts was, on Wednesday afternoon, the quarterback of an 8-2 team, the reigning Super Bowl MVP, the leader of the NFL’s current betting favorite, the pitchman for one of sports’ most iconic brands, fielding another one of those questions that suggests something about him is still up for debate. Hurts was clearly aware of the tempest that had been whirling around his name in the wake of a couple of media reports that suggested a certain level of frustration with Hurts among some coaches and players. “I’m not surprised by anything,” Hurts said, wearing a black compression shirt with the Jumpman logo on his right breast. “This is kind of the nature of the position.” The original reports themselves are rather oblique in nature. Longtime Philly insider Derrick Gunn reported that people in the Eagles organization feel like Hurts has been hurting the offense by playing “his game” rather than the one the game plan calls for. Meanwhile, The Athletic reported a frustration from players about Hurts’ reluctance to throw into tight windows against zone coverage. None of this news qualifies as earth-shaking. In fact, it barely qualifies as news. We know the Eagles are frustrated with their offense. Left tackle Jordan Mailata recently labeled it “stuck-in-the-mud.” Wide receiver A. J. Brown has made it very clear he is frustrated that he isn’t getting the football. Likewise, Hurts has very clearly struggled. When he struggles, he does so in a specific way. He is hesitant, indecisive, overly focused on the safest option, too willing to buy time with his feet and shifts the offense to scramble mode. That’s not a slight against the reports themselves. The notable thing isn’t the news. It’s that the news is being reported. My real focus here is everything that comes after the news. The TV segments, the sports radio calls, newspaper columns like this one, the hour-to-hour churn of the Sports Take Industrial Complex. Everybody has decided it is time to have an honest discussion about Hurts. The thing that most of these opinions ignore is that there is nothing much to discuss. Any time an offense plays the way the Eagles offense has for most of this season, the quarterback will help matters by playing better. Beyond that, there is little to say. There is no existential question. Hurts has already answered all of them. What’s missing is context. In the last 23 years, Jalen Hurts is one of 12 people on the face of the earth to win a Super Bowl as a starting quarterback. He was named the MVP of that Super Bowl, and he very easily could have taken home the award in the other Super Bowl he started in. He is signed to a contract worth a quarter of a billion dollars. The Eagles have been the best team in the NFC for nearly two full seasons now. You can argue that they would already be a dynasty if they had their current defense for the last four years. Can Hurts play better? Sure. It isn’t heresy to suggest it. We’ve seen him do it, most definitively in that Super Bowl LVII loss to the Chiefs. But he is never going to be Patrick Mahomes, or Joe Burrow. The Eagles’ offense might be higher functioning if they had Joe Burrow or Drake Maye. But all of those arguments are roads to nowhere. The only thing that matters is that Hurts has been good enough that the Eagles no longer need to acquire one of those other guys. Coaches and players are more than justified if they are frustrated with some aspects of Hurts’ approach and performance. But they also surely know that they are more fortunate than most. There’s the context that’s often missing from the Hurts debates: how bad so many other teams have it. Watch the Cam Wards, the J. J. McCarthys, the Tua Tagovailoas, any of a number of other quarterbacks who were drafted higher than Hurts with the hope they would become what he is. There is a lot of bad quarterback play out there. There are a lot of teams that have no hope. The divide between the tier of passers who can and can’t is stark. Even at his worst, Hurts is one of the few. There will be no trade, no competition, no readjustment of sights to the Tanner McKee era. That should be obvious to even Hurts’ most ardent of critics. Which brings us back to the original question. What are we arguing about?.
https://www.mcall.com/2025/11/21/eagles-qb-jalen-hurts-deserves-criticism-but-what-are-we-arguing-about/
