Jalen Hurts, the Super Bowl MVP still being asked to prove he can throw

Jalen Hurts

Photo: All-Pro Reels / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 7, 1998 Houston
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Super Bowl · NFC East champions
Individual awards	Time 100

Under the Monday Night Football lights in Chicago, Jalen Hurts was sent flying over the Philadelphia sideline by an illegal hit, bounced up, jogged back toward the huddle and was steered into the medical tent instead. He passed the concussion check and returned four plays later. By then his backup, Andy Dalton, had thrown an interception at the goal line, and the Eagles went on to lose by twenty points. The scene had a familiar shape. For most of his career Hurts has been the quarterback who keeps winning while the league keeps asking whether he is the reason.

The question has a sharper edge now. He owns a Super Bowl ring and the MVP award from the same night, and one offseason ranking of the NFL’s quarterbacks still placed him seventeenth.

Football was the family trade before it was his. The Houston native, born in August 1998, played at Channelview High School, just east of the city, for his father, Averion, the school’s head coach; his older brother, also named Averion, went on to start at quarterback for Texas Southern. Before he was a coveted dual-threat recruit he was a powerlifter who squatted 500 pounds as a sophomore.

Nick Saban gave him the Alabama job in the second game of his freshman season, which made him the first true freshman to start at quarterback for the Crimson Tide in 32 years. He ran for 954 yards that autumn, a school record for the position, was named SEC Offensive Player of the Year and reached the national final, lost 35–31 to Clemson. A year later he led Alabama back to the title game, against Georgia, and was pulled at halftime with his team down 13–0. Tua Tagovailoa came on and won it in overtime.

What Hurts did next is still the most revealing thing about him. He stayed. He spent the following season as Tagovailoa’s backup, and when Tagovailoa was hurt in the SEC Championship Game he came off the bench to lead a 35–28 comeback over the same Georgia team. Then, degree already in hand, he transferred to Oklahoma for a single season under Lincoln Riley and produced 3,851 passing yards, 1,298 rushing yards and 52 total touchdowns, finishing second in the Heisman voting behind Joe Burrow.

The Eagles took him with the 53rd pick of the 2020 draft, a choice that looked odd for a team that had signed Carson Wentz to a long extension the previous summer. By December Wentz had been benched, and Hurts won his first start 24–21 over New Orleans while running for 106 yards. Nick Sirianni arrived as head coach the following year and made him the starter, and Philadelphia began leaning on a sneak in which teammates shove Hurts forward from behind: the Tush Push, a play rival clubs would later try to have banned.

The 2022 season made the case for him in full. Hurts went 14–1 as a starter, accounted for 35 touchdowns, finished second in the MVP vote and took the Eagles to Super Bowl LVII. Against Kansas City he threw for 304 yards and ran for 70 and three touchdowns, quarterback records for the game, and still lost 38–35, a defeat remembered partly for the fumble Nick Bolton returned for a score. That April the club gave him a five-year, $255 million extension, briefly the richest in league history, along with the first no-trade clause the franchise had ever granted.

The season after the contract went sideways. Hurts set a quarterback record with 15 rushing touchdowns, but he also posted career highs in interceptions and lost fumbles, and a team that had started 10–1 left the playoffs after a 32–9 rout in Tampa. Then the arc turned again. With Saquon Barkley running for more than 2,000 yards, Philadelphia went 14–3, and in Super Bowl LIX Hurts beat the Chiefs 40–22 with two touchdown passes, a rushing touchdown and 72 rushing yards, another record for his position. He was named the game’s MVP.

That second Super Bowl did not end the argument. It sharpened it. His 221 passing yards on the night he was named MVP fed the old claim that the title belonged to the offensive line and to Barkley, and 2025 handed his doubters more material. The Eagles repeated as NFC East champions at 11–6, but twice the offense went an entire second half without a single completion, and in an overtime loss to the Los Angeles Chargers Hurts turned the ball over five times. Most of the blame landed on offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo, fired after a 23–19 wild-card loss to San Francisco. His peers’ verdict drifted the same way: third in the players’ NFL Top 100 in 2023, 15th a year later, 19th in 2025. The weak point of the case against him is that it treats a quarterback who wins on third-and-short and inside the red zone as if those plays belonged to someone else.

This season the Eagles hired Sean Mannion, previously the Green Bay Packers’ quarterbacks coach, as their fifth offensive coordinator in five years, and his scheme asks Hurts to take more snaps under center and throw more off play-action than at any point in his career. In June the club traded A.J. Brown, his most dangerous receiver and the father of his goddaughter, to the New England Patriots. The early returns are mixed. Hurts threw three touchdown passes in a 24–22 opening win over Washington and found Darius Cooper for the winning score in the final seconds at Tennessee, then managed 153 passing yards in that 27–7 loss in Chicago.

Away from the stadium he has built an unusual operation: his management team, agent included, is made up entirely of women, a choice he has tied to his support for women in sports. He married Bryonna Burrows, his college sweetheart, in June 2025, the same year Time magazine put him on its list of the 100 most influential people. He sang on A Philly Special Christmas, the holiday record made by Eagles players, turned up with Jason Kelce and Brandon Graham in a cameo on Abbott Elementary, and in March 2026 published a children’s book, Better Than a Touchdown. He finished a master’s degree in human relations at Oklahoma while already Philadelphia’s starter.

The next test comes on Sunday, October 4, at Lincoln Financial Field against the Los Angeles Rams, with the Eagles at 2–1 and an offense still learning its new language. Hurts turned 28 in August. He has outlasted a halftime benching and a draft room’s doubts, and the record so far favours him over the people ranking him.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, American football, Jalen Hurts, Philadelphia Eagles

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