December 19, 2022
CHICAGO, IL. — In his “worst” performance of the season, Jalen Hurts again validated his standing as a legitimate MVP candidate.
I to go all Jim Schwartz on you, but a baseball analogy is needed to explain the brilliance of Hurts’ performance in a 25-20 win over the Bears on Sunday.
The 13-1 Eagles’ on-field leader was hardly himself in the frigid air of the Windy City, fidgeting with a glove on his throwing hand pre-game to deal with his numb hands.
By game time Hurts had ditched the Teddy Bridgewater look for his bare throwing hand and had trouble with his vision on the field before promptly reaching two-thirds of his interception total over the first 13 games by halftime.
To the least common denominator beholden to the tribalism of pedigree and the incessant need to always be right, goalposts must be moved and the uncharacteristic ball-security issues for Hurts had the Chris Simms devotees delighted, right up to Hurts went all Jim Palmer on the Bears.
Palmer, the three-time American League Cy Young Award winner in the 1970s for Schwartz’s beloved Orioles, was one of those old-school pitchers whose career seems like fiction when measured against the arms of today.
Palmer hurled at least 300 innings during four seasons and also had four with 20 or more complete games. In those days it was the job of the ace to put his team in a position to win whether he had his best stuff or not. Palmer did that to the tune of eight 20-win seasons.
The Eagles’ starting QB didn’t have anything close to his best stuff at Soldier Field on Sunday, but still found a way to throw for 315 yards, run for three touchdowns, and pilot an offense that produced over 400 yards.
Most importantly Hurts grinded through 60 minutes of football and produced enough big plays to get the Eagles another win in what is now almost certainly going to result in the NFL’s best record, an NFC East championship, and the No. 1 seed in the conference, not to mention the franchise’s single-season record for wins.
When your worst, and a 64.6 passer rating was a season-low for Hurts, is still good enough to push your team over the finish line, that’s the definition of an ace.
“He controls what he can control,” coach Nick Sirianni said. “He can't control a bad play earlier. He moves on to the next play. It's no surprise. That's who this guy is. And we've seen that over and over again.
“... He continues to put himself in the moment and learn from the past and try to repeat the good things and get better from the things he messed up. But he's completely in the moment, and I think that's what great players do."
What Hurts’ critics will point to this as some kind of MVP roadblock for the third-year quarterback is actually another checkmark in his column as the Eagles avoided another lull other marquee teams like Dallas suffer all too much.
On the very day Hurts was overcoming his latest adversity, the Cowboys surrendered a 17-point lead before losing in overtime to Jacksonville, rendering the Christmas Eve game in North Texas essentially moot.
The Eagles are winning the division and ensuring the conference’s road to the Super Bowl will run through Lincoln Financial Field as long as 13 wins turn into the franchise record of 14 over the final three weeks.
While Sirianni claimed there is no such thing as a trap game in the NFL leading up to Sunday’s win, with another QB the coach would have considered himself trapped against the Bears. The Eagles hardly packed their A-game in the Louis Vuitton bags Hurts gifted to his offensive linemen last week.
The good news is that they didn’t need it because the ace found a way.
John McMullen is a contributor to PhillyVoice.com and covers the Eagles and the NFL for Sports Illustrated and JAKIB Sports. He’s also the co-host of “Birds 365,” a daily streaming show covering the Eagles and the NFL, and the host of “Extending the Play” on AM1490 in South Jersey. You can reach him at jmcmullen44@gmail.com.
