PHOENIX — Before the start of the Eagles’ season, Michael Vick offered Jalen Hurts a piece of advice.
The former Eagles quarterback wanted Hurts to draw on his experiences before his third season began. He wanted Hurts to feel the freedom that Vick believed he was never quite afforded as a mobile quarterback.
“Just to be himself and play his game,” Vick remembers telling Hurts. “Don’t waver. Don’t buy into what’s being said or what people might be saying on TV or how they might view you as a quarterback. How you grow in this game is predicated on how much time you put into it.”
Hurts and Vick both arrived in Arizona earlier this week for Super Bowl LVII — Vick as a member of the Fox Sports broadcast team for the game and Hurts preparing to be one of the few true dual-threat quarterbacks in recent memory to make it to the NFL’s biggest stage.
The “running quarterback” trope that often saddles athletic Black signal callers has become less prevalent over the last few decades, and Hurts is the beneficiary.
Vick spent his career trying to improve as a pocket passer despite being one of the most electric players in league history. Before him, Donovan McNabb transitioned away from scrambling amid veiled criticism of his play.
Hurts has taken Vick’s advice and run with it. He’s only the third quarterback to lead his team to the Super Bowl while surpassing 100 rushing attempts, and his 165 carries this season lead the limited group of dual-threat quarterbacks to make it this far by a wide margin. If the Eagles beat the Chiefs, he’ll be the first quarterback in league history to have surpassed 100 carries en route to a championship.
Hurts’ MVP-caliber season and postseason success have further dispelled the notion that it’s harder to win without a conventional pocket passer, but it was never about that for him. He was just heeding Vick’s advice.
“I think every guy has a unique way of doing what they do,” Hurts said last week. “You’re not going to turn on the TV and see everybody playing the game the same way. I don’t necessarily take pride in playing the game a certain way, I just take pride in being who I am. Everybody does it differently, you know? Everybody has something that makes them special and great.”
The future of the game
Jeffrey Lurie first envisioned a story like Hurts’ while watching Tennessee State University as a teenager.
Around 1967, the Eagles owner saw Eldridge Dickey, the Tigers quarterback. He was elusive in the open field, ambidextrous, and ahead of his time. It was an era remembered for quarterbacks like Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas. In Dickey, Lurie saw a player who could change the game.
“My favorite player in college as a football fanatic,” Lurie said during the Super Bowl’s opening night on Monday. “... I couldn’t wait, as a fan, for the NFL to see what this guy could do. Rolling to the left and throwing left. Rolling to the right and throwing right.”
Dickey’s chance to revolutionize the league never truly came. He was drafted 25th overall by the Raiders in 1968 but was quickly moved to receiver with two-time All-Pro Daryle Lamonica already entrenched under center in Oakland.
When Lurie bought the Eagles in 1994, the belief that athletic quarterbacks would become a staple of the league remained with him. Randall Cunningham was already established with the Eagles by the time Lurie took over — the Eagles actually benched Cunningham in favor of Rodney Peete early in the 1995 campaign to fit Ray Rhodes’ West Coast offense. Still, Lurie eventually oversaw an era that featured McNabb and then Vick.
Hurts admired the two Eagles quarterbacks from afar growing up in Houston. He said he had McNabb and Vick jerseys and eventually developed an appreciation for Cunningham after joining the Eagles organization.
“When I got drafted to Philly, it felt like, I don’t know, destiny,” Hurts told The Philadephia Inquirer’s Jeff McLane in August. “I’ve definitely modeled my game in different ways around all of them over the years as I’ve grown and as I kind of hold this torch up of being the next dual-threat African American quarterback in Philly and knowing what that means to them and to this franchise.
“It’s important to me.”
Running ability for quarterbacks hasn’t been a strict prerequisite for Lurie; the Eagles drafted Nick Foles and Kevin Kolb with Andy Reid at the helm and traded for Sam Bradford to run Chip Kelly’s offense. As the league continues to evolve, though, Lurie said the importance of athleticism at the position has become even more obvious to him.
“I’ve always believed that the best athletes over the last several years and going forward are on the defensive side of the ball,” Lurie said. “Unless you can have some degree of mobility, it’s hard to have a sustaining, elite offense. It can be done if you’re Tom Brady or Peyton [Manning,] but in today’s world, all the good young quarterbacks in the league from Josh Allen to Justin Herbert, the outstanding quarterback we’re going to play on Sunday, Patrick [Mahomes,] they all have some degree of mobility. I felt it was important to us to have that triple-threat quarterback.”
Triple threat
Hurts referred to himself as a “triple threat” last October after tossing four touchdown passes in a win over the Pittsburgh Steelers.
He wanted to beat teams with his arm, his legs, and his mind.
The groundwork for his goal was laid largely in the offseason, when Hurts worked with quarterback mechanics guru Adam Dedeaux at the 3DQB training facility in California to improve his throwing motion and accuracy. Hurts had grown accustomed to learning a new offensive scheme each summer as coaching instability became the norm during his college career and early with the Eagles. With the Eagles staff intact for consecutive years, he shifted his focus toward fundamentals.
“Taking the time to do that and make that adjustment, I don’t think he ever really got a chance to do it before,” Eagles quarterbacks coach Brian Johnson said. “It’s really paid off. He understands what it feels like when it’s wrong.”
The work resulted in training sessions in which Hurts had members of the Eagles receiving corps run routes as he fine-tuned the details of his mechanics. Hurts would sometimes bring Dedeaux to the sessions and the two would reference the footage of his throws between reps, often asking his receivers to repeat the route so he could make subtle improvements.
Star receiver A.J. Brown grew tired of the monotony enough to voice his objection, and Hurts shot back.
“Run it versus press.”
“I was like, ‘Bro, that is the same route!’ ” Brown recounted last week. “We had to get on the same page about that, but the whole time he was just working. Working on different things.”
While Hurts still embraces the impact he has as a part of the Eagles running game and as a scrambler, the strides he made as a passer and a processor were evident during his third season. He completed 66.5% of his passes, up more than 5% from last season, and threw for 3,701 yards.
His six interceptions gave him one of the lowest interception rates in the league and his completion percentage above expectation ranked fourth in the league, illustrating how successful he was even on low-probability attempts.
Those strides were enough for Eagles general manager Howie Roseman to take exception to the notion that Hurts is simply a “running quarterback” before the team left for Phoenix last week.
“This guy has had an MVP year because of how he is as a passer,” Roseman said. “His will to work. His understanding about the things that he can change to go from good to great. It’s an unbelievable success story for him. He deserves a tremendous amount of credit because it’s about him and our coaches and the work they’ve put in.”
Hurts’ understanding of the offense developed as well. Several Eagles players and coaches noted that he made more checks at the line of scrimmage this season; some of the biggest plays of the year actually came with a Hurts audible at the foundation.
Eagles passing game coordinator Kevin Patullo said the first signs that Hurts would take such a leap as a processor came late in the 2021 season.
“At the end of the year, there were a few games where he was able to get us in the right play at the line of scrimmage,” Patullo said. “And there wasn’t a call for it and he did it on his own. That happened this year and quite a few of them were for big plays. When that happens, you’re like, ‘OK, he’s seeing it well.’”
Some of Hurts’ most famous checks — at least famous among the Eagles’ offensive coaches — include two go routes against pressure that resulted in touchdowns. Patullo’s favorite was a 28-yard score to Brown against the Steelers in Week 8.
“He knew they were pressuring,” Patullo said. “He knew he had A.J. one-on-one and he threw a go route to him up the sideline. That was one of my favorite ones by far.
“He did it on his own,” Patullo added. “So that was pretty special.”
For Johnson, Hurts’ touchdown pass to DeVonta Smith against the New York Giants in Week 14 shined most. Hurts read the blitz and beat Giants safety Julian Love playing single-high coverage with a well-placed pass to Smith after making a check at the line.
“He saw a specific coverage look,” the quarterbacks coach said.
Running to Phoenix
As much as his game has expanded, Hurts still has a chance to join a limited group at kickoff Sunday because of his running.
A few athletic quarterbacks have won championships. The San Francisco 49ers’ Steve Young has two Lombardi Trophies and Russell Wilson has a title as well.
For quarterbacks as involved in the running game as Hurts, though, even the list to make it to the NFL’s final weekend is limited to a few names. Hurts’ 165 rushing attempts are the most by a quarterback who led his team to the Super Bowl in NFL history and 33 higher than Cam Newton in second place.
His 760 rushing yards rank second behind only Wilson’s mark in the 2014 season, when the Seahawks fell to the New England Patriots. Dual-threat quarterbacks like Colin Kaepernick and Steve McNair made it to the Super Bowl as well — McNair holds the Super Bowl rushing record for a quarterback with 64 yards in 2000.
Only Newton and Wilson made it to the Super Bowl after logging more than 100 carries in the regular season. Newton had 636 rushing yards on 132 attempts in the 2015 season before losing to the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl 50.
For Vick, seeing Hurts lean into his potential as a runner has been a gratifying experience.
“I don’t think Jalen ever shied away from his running ability,” Vick said. “He knows what got him over the hump at Oklahoma and at ‘Bama, along with his passing. He’s just become a better passer. … He put it all together. You just see the maturation of a quarterback who is able to take his abilities, add it to the abilities that others can teach him to make him a better quarterback, and that’s amazing.”
Eagles cornerback James Bradberry played with Newton in Carolina from 2016 to 2019 and noticed similarities between Newton and Hurts that help explain why they’re part of a limited but growing group of mobile quarterbacks to orchestrate playoff runs.
It comes down to decision-making and ball security.
“I think the one misconception about dual-threat quarterbacks is that they’re careless with the football,” Bradberry said. “That’s one thing Cam and Jalen have in common. Not to say they’re conservative with the ball, but they make good decisions. They’re smart on the field. ... They can get out of any situation when the play breaks down. That’s one of the things that make them special.”
Growing up, Hurts idolized Newton along with the cast of Eagles greats. He said last week it would be “pretty cool” to make history along with Mahomes as the first pair of Black quarterbacks to face off in the Super Bowl.
Even with the progress Black quarterbacks have made in the last few decades, Vick warns, there will still be detractors. Even if Hurts hoists the trophy, they’ll be there.
“It’s a lot of stereotypes,” Vick said. “We found ways to overcome that. We found ways to cross that barrier, but there’s always going to be stereotypes. There’s going to be stereotypes for white quarterbacks as well. They can’t run. That’s what they’ll say. We can run. That’s the stereotype.”
Hurts is aware of those stereotypes. He acknowledged his critics after the Eagles’ Week 14 win over the Giants this season, saying some suggested he couldn’t “throw it five yards” early in his career.
He hears the critiques but isn’t consumed by them.
“You can look back and say there are so many things that could motivate me and drive me to want more and be the best,” Hurts said Thursday. “Why do I just keep getting up and going? I had a purpose before anybody had an opinion. It’s not about anybody else.”
”I know y’all liked that one,” Hurts added, smiling.
