How Brian Johnson’s two-decade relationship with Eagles QB Jalen Hurts sparked their rapid rises in the NFL

INDIANAPOLIS — Brian Johnson remembers Jalen Hurts as a stone-faced kid running around a Houston high school field house two decades ago.

The new Eagles offensive coordinator and his starting quarterback first met sometime around 2002, when Johnson transferred to Baytown Lee High School as a Division I hopeful going into his junior season. Hurts’ father, Averion, was the defensive coordinator on the staff and would bring his two boys to practice so often he called it their “day care.”

“They were everywhere,” said Dick Olin, Baytown Lee’s coach at the time. “They were always there and I loved it. Jalen was just hanging around and doing everything.”

Hurts and his older brother, Averion Jr., spent their time watching Johnson and Baytown’s other quarterbacks during practice, sprinting together around the field house, and working the sideline as ball boys on Friday nights.

It was the first touchpoint of Hurts and Johnson’s respective paths, which have become further intertwined as both forged bright futures in the NFL — Hurts as one of the game’s best young quarterbacks and Johnson, 36, as the Eagles’ next offensive coordinator to have gained notoriety.

The role their 20-year-old relationship has played in their individual progress is both difficult to quantify and undeniable. They each might have fulfilled their potential without being in lockstep the last two years, but the heights they’ve reached together make it easy to see how important they’ve been for each other.

“To have the history that we have, I think it pays dividends to this team’s success,” Hurts said before Super Bowl LVII last month.

» READ MORE: More than a dual-threat QB: Jalen Hurts’ unprecedented Super Bowl run

Well before joining the Eagles’ coaching staff, unsuccessfully recruiting Hurts for two programs, or serving as one of his earliest idols, Johnson remembers Hurts as a stoic kid who took after his father both in disposition and appearance.

“I just remember those guys always around,” Johnson told The Inquirer in October. “His dad is a really awesome coach, really awesome dude. You could tell early on that those guys would be all ball, because his dad was all ball.”

The history of kids around the Baytown Lee field house traced back before the Hurts family. Olin had used the field house as alternative “day care” for his kids years before and said he encouraged his assistants to follow suit throughout his 17-year tenure as Baytown Lee’s coach.

» READ MORE: Inside Jalen Hurts’ Houston legend: Family, football, food, and fantastic finishes

Olin also noticed Jalen Hurts’ demeanor, and his initial instinct was to look out for a mischievous mind lurking behind the kid’s poker face.

He even warned Averion Sr. to keep an eye on his youngest son, something he’d later have to retract.

“I told Hurtsy, ‘You gotta watch that guy,’” Olin said. “He’s going to fool you just with his facial expression because he just doesn’t change. I told Hurtsy later, ‘Golly, I was so wrong. That guy is just cerebral. He thinks.’ The key, and people don’t recognize this, that’s good parenting.”

During Johnson’s college career, Olin visited his former quarterback with plans to take him and a former teammate out to dinner.

Johnson’s Utah Utes hosted former Baytown standout Michael Reed’s BYU Cougars one season, and Olin wanted to break bread with his former players in Provo.

Their restaurant choice still haunts him.

“They wanted to eat Mexican food,” Olin said. “At Brigham Young. It was average, at best.”

Johnson spent his junior season at Baytown Lee as a slot receiver, stuck behind former Iowa and CFL player Drew Tate on the quarterback depth chart. But he played well enough under center his senior year to get a scholarship offer from Dan Mullen, Utah’s quarterbacks coach at the time. Johnson proved Mullen right, even after the coach left for the University of Florida, becoming a three-year starter who led the Utes to a 13-0 record in 2008 as the Mountain West Conference’s offensive player of the year.

After Johnson’s college career had ended, Olin said he received a call from his former quarterback as he decided what was next. Despite his college productivity, he wasn’t viewed as a coveted draft prospect and had an offer to start a coaching career from Utah coach Kyle Whittingham.

“He called me up,” Olin said. “He said, ‘Coach, I just got offered a job when I graduate and it’s going to pay me $125,000 at Utah.’ I said: ‘Take it.’”

Johnson didn’t. He went undrafted in 2009 and ended up in the United Football League for a season before giving up the game in favor of the job offer he’d gotten the year prior.

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As a Mississippi State assistant in charge of recruiting the Houston area a few years later, Johnson’s coaching career quickly brought him back into Hurts’ life. When he visited Channelview, led by Averion Sr. at that point and featuring Hurts at quarterback, he saw what the past 10 years had done for the quiet kid he remembered from Baytown Lee.

“You could tell that he had that same demeanor that he has now,” Johnson said. “Very serious. And you could tell he was going to be a really, really good player. Obviously he was raw still, he was 15 or 16 years old at the time. You could see him as an athlete, him as a person, him as a player, you could tell he was going to be a really good player.”

Even though Johnson was unsuccessful in recruiting Hurts to the Bulldogs, the mutual admiration was apparent. Johnson took another run at Hurts a few years later, this time as an assistant under Mullen at Florida hoping to persuade Hurts to transfer there instead of Oklahoma before the 2019 season.

“He always wanted me to play for him,” Hurts said before the Super Bowl. “Always wanted to coach me. I always wanted to play for him as well. ... Things have their way of working themselves out.”

Johnson and Hurts’ connection as quarterbacks coach and quarterback has been apparent each of the last two seasons. It was foundational in Hurts’ development into an MVP candidate and something Olin, now retired, has noticed in subtle ways watching the two from afar.

» READ MORE: ‘Great offensive mind’: Eagles promote QB coach Brian Johnson to offensive coordinator

Olin’s coaching philosophy was defined by maintaining “one voice” in the quarterback’s ear as a way to avoid interference from too many messengers. That philosophy, to a certain extent, is on display most times Hurts comes to the sideline during a game.

“You watch Jalen and you see people gravitate to him,” Olin said Thursday. “But then watch where he goes when he comes to the sideline. He goes to Brian. You always talk to the quarterback about what they see, what we need to do. … That’s the whole key, the communication between the coach and the quarterback, in my opinion. And Brian does a great job.”

Johnson’s communication with Hurts will increase now that he has replaced Shane Steichen as play-caller. Coach Nick Sirianni had confirmed that the next offensive coordinator would retain play-calling duties before Johnson was hired and expressed confidence in Johnson’s ability to do so earlier this week.

“Brian is a sharp, sharp dude,” Sirianni said. “I lean on him for so many different things and now he’s in charge of running the offense.”

» READ MORE: ‘Phenomenal as OC’: Shane Steichen discusses Brian Johnson’s new role and reflects on his time with Eagles

Steichen, who took the Indianapolis Colts’ head-coaching job, worked alongside Johnson and Hurts each of the last two seasons and noticed their history afforded them the ability to have candid conversations without fear of overstepping.

Those conversations will be even more important going into the season with Johnson as the voice in Hurts’ headset, Steichen said.

“I think they can have those intimate conversations with each other,” Steichen said. “They’re going back to the Houston days, when you’re tighter and you’re connected, there’s a lot of things that go along with that.”

Johnson has known Hurts long enough to understand the evolution of his crawfish recipe.

The Hurts family tradition of seafood boils, particularly crawfish, is well-known in the Houston high school football community. It’s a recipe passed down three generations and a fixture of their summer cookouts, with Hurts being the latest to put his twist on the ingredients his dad taught him.

When Johnson joined Hurts in Philadelphia in 2021, it wasn’t too long before Hurts started getting shipments of live crawfish from somewhere near the Gulf of Mexico and bringing a piece of Houston culture to Philly. For Johnson, it’s one of the ways Hurts represents their shared hometown the most.

“The one thing that he got from his dad is he knows how to cook some crawfish,” Johnson said. “That probably embodies it more than anything. There’s been a couple of crawfish boils here in Philadelphia now. We’ve been able to bring some of that flavor up here to the Northeast. His ability to boil that crawfish is something special.

“He’s got his own lil’ spin on it. He might be able to duel his old man now.”

The Eagles’ game at Houston in November served as a special moment for the two to return to where their football careers began. Hurts grew up a Texans fan with a godfather running the team’s player personnel department for a time, and the Thursday night game was his first opportunity to play at NRG Stadium.

Hurts had roughly two dozen family members in attendance for the game, which the Eagles won, 29-17.

Johnson coached at the University of Houston for one season in 2017 and maintains a tight-knit group of friends from the area, similar to Hurts.

“It obviously has shaped who both of us are as people, as men,” Johnson said. “I have a lot of fond memories of growing up in that area, a lot of close friends who I’m close with to this day. My group of childhood friends is the same group I’ve had when I was 6 years old. When you grow up in a little bit of a smaller subset town of a big city like that, we all grew up together. We all experienced a lot of things that helped develop us into the men that we are today.”