July 13, 2026
Colleen Claggett/for PhillyVoice
ESPN.com's annual survey of NFL personnel led to Jalen Hurts not being ranked among the league's top 10 QBs.
NFL personnel no longer see Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts as a top-10 player at his position.
ESPN.com on Monday released the quarterback edition of its yearly survey polling NFL executives, coaches and scouts to create a top 10 and honorable mention at each position.
Hurts, coming off a personal-best 25-touchdown season but also a first-round playoff exit, fell out of the top 10 altogether and was the seventh and final name listed among the honorable mentions.
Last year, Hurts ranked ninth coming off a Super Bowl win in which he was named MVP. He, Baker Mayfield and Jayden Daniels were all top-10 QBs from the 2025 survey who didn't crack the top 10 this summer, replaced by Dak Prescott, Drake Maye and Caleb Williams, which surely will not go over well with the legions of Eagles fans that already believe Hurts is routinely disrespected nationally and locally by the media.
Here is how the best 10 quarterbacks ranked, per ESPN.com's survey.
| Rank | QB | 2025 Rank |
| 1 | Josh Allen | 2 |
| 2 | Patrick Mahomes | 1 |
| 3 | Matthew Stafford | 6 |
| 4 | Joe Burrow | 3 |
| 5 | Lamar Jackson | 4 |
| 6 | Dak Prescott | Not ranked |
| 7 | Justin Herbert | 7 |
| 8 | Drake Maye | Not ranked |
| 9 | Jared Goff | 8 |
| 10 | Caleb Williams | Not ranked |
Joining Hurts among the honorable mentions were: Super Bowl champion Sam Darnold, Daniels, Jordan Love, Brock Purdy, Mayfield, and Trevor Lawrence.
Here's what an anonymous AFC offensive coach said about Hurts, per the ESPN.com story:
"I know it has been up-and-down, but I'm still betting on the Super Bowl credentials, the intangibles and the toughness." [ESPN.com]
The author of the annual survey, Jeremy Fowler, shed more light on the rankings by showing what tiers the quarterbacks fell into.
The QB voting, broken into tiers
— Jeremy Fowler (@JFowlerESPN) July 13, 2026
Allen
Mahomes
-
Stafford
-
Burrow
Jackson
-
Prescott
Herbert
Maye
Goff
-
Williams
Darnold
Daniels
Love (10-13 incredibly close)
Purdy
Mayfield
-
Lawrence
Hurts
-
Nix
Jones
Stroud https://t.co/aQtWeVHfQ2
The debate over where Hurts ranks among his peers is an annual late-summer/NFL dead period exercise, and often ends up with scores of Eagles fans taking to social media to air their grievances.
Last year, Hurts was viewed as disrespected by several sports outlets that do positional rankings, including Yahoo! and NBC Sports, each of which didn't have Hurts ranked in the top 10 despite the team's Super Bowl run.
Hurts has been to two Super Bowls, was the MVP of one of them, and was a defensive holding call away from potentially having two rings and two Super Bowl MVPs.
But also, he has never thrown for more than 4,000 yards or 30 touchdowns, and the Eagles' passing offense has labored during stretches – sometimes long stretches – of each of the past three seasons, the latest one leading to the firing of play caller Kevin Patullo and hiring of new OC Sean Mannion as the Eagles were a three-and-out factory.
The Eagles registered the NFL's 23rd-ranked pass offense after ranking 29th in 2024 and 16th in 2023. Fairly or not, quarterbacks are often judged by the strength of their respective team's passing game more so than total offense or overall team success, which is how Dak Prescott and Justin Herbert can be viewed as top 10 despite the Cowboys missing the playoffs and the Chargers being 0-3 in the postseason with Herbert.
Williams is somewhat of an outlier, as he completed just 58.1 percent of his passes – the lowest among any QB with at least 11 starts – and didn't hit the 4,000-yard barrier or 30-touchdown mark, but the Bears overall produced a top-10 passing offense and Williams led the NFL with six fourth-quarter comebacks, several of which were on prime time.
The ranking also shows how NFL personnel frequently favor draft pedigree, as nine of the top 10 are first-round picks, and how year to year these rankings can be, evidenced by Maye and Williams jumping ahead of Hurts and into the top 10 after taking their respective team to the postseason in 2025 following disappointing rookie seasons.
Meanwhile, Darnold – the third overall pick in 2018 – just won a Super Bowl, has consecutive 4,000-yard passing seasons, has made the last two Pro Bowls, and has a 100.9 passer rating over the past two seasons isn't ranked among the 10 best, either.
Daniels ranked fifth last year after a splashy rookie season in which he took the Commanders to the NFC Championship and won Offensive Rookie of the Year, but fell out of the top 10 altogether after an injury marred 2025 in which he started just seven games and saw big drops in completion percentage, passer rating and yards per game.
Bottom line: There's no exact science to this. But the way Hurts is viewed nationally is consistently much different than how he's viewed among the fan base, and always makes for a good sports argument.
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