Let’s get this out of the way right at the top.
Jalen Hurts did not have a great 2025 season.
Objectively, it’s a fact. In terms of the traditional numbers, his 98.5 QB rating was 12th out 41 players with at least 150 attempts, he was 16th in passing yards (3,224), tied for 9th in touchdowns (25), his 64.8% completion percentage was 21st, and he tied for 19th in yards per attempt.
The nerd statistics had him at 21st in EPA/Play, 18th in Pass EPA, and a whopping 33rd in success rate. Folks, those numbers
are straight-up garbage. Perhaps most surprising for a player whose legs have always been a key aspect to his dynamism, he was 20th in scramble percentage, and his 421 yards on the ground were 6th among QBs. As Ruben Frank noted in an excellent NBC Sports article last week, the offense stumbled in large part because Hurts stopped running with the football this season.
When Hurts ran five times this year, the Eagles were 8-2. When he didn’t, they were 3-4. Throughout his career, they’re 57-24 when he runs five times and 9-12-1 when he doesn’t…
…Hurts was asked numerous times this year why he hasn’t run as much, and he always answered the same way, saying he’s doing what he’s told to do. And the RPO numbers were way down – just 81 RPOs all year compared to 128 last year. And he only ran on 10 of them, compared to 41 last year.
Hurts’ 421 yards rushing were the lowest of his career as a starter, a full 209 yards less than a season ago in which he played one fewer game. He was still successful when he did run (a 53.3% success rate was just a tick under his 55.3% a year ago), but he attempted just 6.6 rushes per game, down from 10.0, 9.2, 11.0 and 9.3 in his first four seasons as a starter.
Jalen Hurts is, without question, a championship-caliber quarterback. Even his harshest critics have to cede that much. He was the best player on the field in Super Bowl 57, a lock to win MVP if the defense hadn’t allowed Kansas City to kick the game-winning field goal at the end of regulation, and he played flawlessly in Super Bowl 59, taking home MVP honors in New Orleans. He has traditionally played his best at the end of seasons and upped his game in the postseason.
Just not this year.
Like every quarterback, Jalen Hurts has strengths and weakness, both on the field and off.
No one outside the Nova Care Complex knows exactly what Hurts truly wants to do on offense. You hear reports about Hurts’ unhappiness with the conservative nature of Nick Sirianni and, this year, fired OC Kevin Patullo, but then you also see a reluctance to throw intermediate routes over the middle and in tighter windows. Former Eagles insider Derrick Gunn reported Hurts didn’t throw the ball in-game the way he did in practice, often refusing to follow the play design in the heat of the moment.
“Those things that [get] dissected on film [and] during practice, those things that are talked about among the quarterback coach, the offensive coordinator, the head coach, it has been constantly discussed all season long. Yet, when they transition to the field on a football game, [Hurts] plays his game. Not the game the coaches want him to play. He plays his game. I don’t think you can get out of that mode at this particular point. I think it’s what we’re going to have to watch all season long, is him playing his game.”
“You look at a lot of quarterbacks, they’re going to sling it,” Gunn said. “They’re going to trying to throw it through the eye of the needle. Sometimes you just have to take that chance. That’s not his game. That’s why he stands back there, a lot of the time he’s patting the ball, patting the ball, and it throws the timing of the offense off. The rhythm is thrown off. . . . They can’t get him out of it.
“It’s frustrating in a lot of ways, to the coaching staff. And to the players. Extremely frustrating to the players. Because when they look at the film, the next day or a few days later, they see what’s available out there and what should’ve happened, and it didn’t happen, it’s frustrating to them as well. . . . I’m just basically telling you there’s a lot of people in that organization that are frustrated with the quarterback situation right now. But the quarterback understands he has them over a barrel. This is almost Carson Wentz part two. They’re not going to eat this kind of money yet.”
Hurts clearly doesn’t want to turn the ball over and, as we saw in the divisional round of the playoffs, turnovers were a huge factor.
CJ Stroud wasted an incredible defense with four abominable first half interceptions in the Texans’ loss to the Patriots. Josh Allen, the reigning NFL MVP and de facto best quarterback in football, turned it over five times. He lost in overtime, failing once again to get to the game Hurts has already been to twice, and won once, in convincing fashion. Caleb Williams, author of the Windy City Heave, threw three interceptions, the third of them in overtime with his team 15 yards away from a game-winning field goal attempt mere moments after authoring one of the greatest throws in playoff history. Both Allen and Williams were largely given a pass for their teams’ losses, despite the turnovers.
Hurts has four career turnovers in the postseason, and one can be sure the same grace would not have been granted to Hurts by the postgame film grinders and professional talkers as was given to Allen and Williams. Seattle’s Sam Darnold is given credit for his team’s success despite most of it coming from an explosive run game and dominant defense. Hurts does not get that benefit of the doubt.
Hurts threw only six interceptions all season, four of them in one game against the Chargers. In 2024, he threw just five. He doesn’t put the ball in harm’s way, and when you’ve got a good running game and dominant offensive line, you can win a championship with an ultra-conservative passing offense, provided you hit on some explosives down the field, too. But those explosives also rarely materialized in the second half of ‘25, resulting in an offense that put up the most 3-and-outs in the NFL.
A 3-and-out is not a turnover, but when you have more of them than any team in the league, they can be just as detrimental.
Jalen is an accurate passer when given time and he throws a great deep ball. Had A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith been a bit better, the Eagles probably beat the 49ers in the wild card round. Hurts was done in by some drops, and he certainly had little help from Saquon Barkley and the run game, although his own failure to run factors into that, too (more on that in a minute). He’s been much better against the blitz since the 2023 disaster, but he still holds the ball in the pocket too long, and bails from clean pockets too soon. He does not go through his progressions well, but the offensive scheme also did him and his skill position partners no easy answers for much of the season.
It’s fair to say that Hurts left too much meat on the bone while at the same time acknowledging everyone around him failed, too.
Then, there is the running or, more precisely, the lack thereof. We’re not sure how good a pocket passer Jalen Hurts could be because he’s never had a system in place designed to scheme guys open. Sirianni’s philosophy has always been to run simple plays and simple routes and ask his talented players to win one-on-one battles. That worked, for a time. It didn’t work this year, especially as the offense grew more predictable and stale. What we saw in 2025 was a quarterback who refused to run but wasn’t able to make up for it in the pocket.
Was that because of the offensive philosophy he was asked to participate in, or because it’s what he prefers? Is it a little of both? If it is both, can a new scheme and play caller help Hurts break out of his shell as a passer and risk a little more? Is he already wanting to do that? Can he be effective enough in a new scheme in which he doesn’t have to run the ball?
It’s OK to say Jalen Hurts gets unfairly targeted for criticism and played in a terribly-schemed offense while at the same time admitting he has weaknesses and shortcomings and played some confounding football this year. For someone who says winning matters above all else, it’s hard to understand why he didn’t run the ball in their playoff loss to San Francisco as the team was mired in one their typical weekly second half stall-outs.
Off the field, a different report seems to come out everyday about Hurts’ personality and leadership. Last week, The Athletic asked 100 people in sports which leaders they most admire. Jalen came in at No. 12 and was the No. 1 player in the NFL on the list.
Credentials: The quarterback of the defending Super Bowl champions, Hurts, is still not always considered one of the best at his position. However, after leading the Eagles to two Super Bowl appearances, our voters recognized his stoic and steady leadership.
Olivia Smoliga, Olympic swimmer: “He’s so calm, when someone could crash out at all the things that he’s experienced. He just shows how steady he is and centered in himself, and I really, truly admire that.”
And yet, The Athletic’s Mike Silver wrote last week that key decision-makers inside the Eagles are scared to criticize him.
This is especially true when it’s juxtaposed against a sense inside the locker room that the Eagles’ powerbrokers (Sirianni, general manager Howie Roseman and owner Jeffrey Lurie) are reluctant to criticize Hurts. For all that the quarterback has accomplished, including two standout performances on the sport’s biggest stage (one of which earned him Super Bowl MVP honors), he has been the source of much internal frustration, including from teammates other than Brown.
Hurts, who has an endorsement deal with Michael Jordan’s brand within the Nike subdivision, fashions himself as the NFL’s “MJ” — witness his hallway pose with a cigar and the Lombardi Trophy last February — and some in the organization take that personally.
Jordan, at times, could be abrasive and biting while relentlessly prodding his teammates to push themselves to excellence. He was also, in the opinion of many, the greatest basketball player of all time, as well as the dude you absolutely wanted with the ball in his hands and everything on the line.
Hurts had that chance last Sunday, and his performance wasn’t exactly Jordanesque. And although that single failure doesn’t disqualify him from being able to lead, some of his other qualities — obsessive perfectionism, hyper-focus that can come off as aloofness, a tendency to go his own way — aren’t always serving him well in tense moments such as this one.
The week before, PHLY’s EJ Smith wrote about how a once distant Jalen Hurts was “letting down his walls,” being more involved with his teammates off the field, going to events, and opening himself up more. His relationship with Brown seemed to improve as the season wore on, although it was hard not to read some of Brown’s social media interactions as acts of frustration directed at his QB.
It’s pretty simple. When you lose and the product on the field falls far below the talent level, people want to know why. Leaders get blamed. You don’t hear criticisms when a team meets expectations.
The reality is there is some truth to all of it. People are complicated. People change. Leaders change. You learn from mistakes and adapt. Hurts’ stoicism at times can be a very good thing. There are times when it’s a negative. The same can be said for A.J. Brown’s outspokenness or Nick Sirianni’s passion.
Nuance is difficult to talk about when social media and online content creation demands people stake out a claim and plant a flag. The truth is often harder to quantify, and that can make finding solutions elusive and frustrating. Everyone wants a clear answer, something or someone obvious to blame, because it’s easier to fix.
Maybe a new voice leading the offense will be just the thing to help Hurts improve as a passer. Perhaps Hurts realized this year that, if he wants to win another Super Bowl and be an elite QB, he’s going to have to risk injury and run with the football, whether that be creating plays out of structure or with designed runs/RPOs.
Jalen Hurts is not the only reason the Eagles’ offense struggled this year. He is not even the biggest reason. It would be nice if we could criticize and/or defend the Eagles’ star quarterback in a way that is fair and nuanced while at the same time being tough and demanding. He doesn’t need people making excuses for him. There should be high expectations for a $50 million a year player who wants to be thought of as this generation’s Michael Jordan.
Simply put, Jalen Hurts didn’t meet them this year. He also didn’t have much help. This will be a key off-season for the Eagles’ franchise quarterback, one that could determine the direction of his future in Philadelphia.
