‘Two alphas’: How Jalen Hurts’ QB battle with Tua Tagovailoa at Alabama helped shape the Eagles star

A dejected Jalen Hurts walked into an Alabama assistant coach’s office without knowing where to turn.

The Sunday before the start of the 2018 college football season, Hurts had just lost the starting quarterback job to Tua Tagovailoa after an offseason battle. He’d been through the wringer, getting benched in the national championship game the year before despite going 26-2 as a starter and watching as Tagovailoa led the Crimson Tide to a title.

After Alabama head coach Nick Saban called the two young quarterbacks into his office to render the verdict the following September, Hurts went to then-Alabama offensive coordinator Mike Locksley with a complicated question presented in a simple package.

“What do I do now?”

“That was the first time I ever saw him emotional,” Locksley said. “He was in tears, he walked into my office and said, ‘What do I do now? I’m 26-2 as a starter and I just lost my job. What do I do?’ I didn’t have a great answer for him other than, ‘I don’t know why this happened now, but I guarantee you that this will benefit you down the road in life, whether it’s in football or in life in general. … Utilize this opportunity.’ And there’s no doubt he did.”

Hurts and Tagovailoa will meet for the first time as NFL quarterbacks on Sunday when the Miami Dolphins travel to Lincoln Financial Field to face the Eagles, both of them leading legitimate Super Bowl contenders fueled by explosive offenses. Hurts’ three years at Alabama featured a meteoric rise, a fall from grace, and an eventual resurgence, all with Tagovailoa as a central figure, part foil and part companion.

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Hurts’ decision to stay at Alabama for the 2018 season as Tagovailoa’s backup proved instrumental. Saban’s pitch to Hurts for staying rather than transferring was getting a chance to focus on taking the necessary strides as a passer and a processor to go with the dynamic ability that has helped make him a self-proclaimed “triple threat” who can beat teams with his arm, his legs, and his mind.

“I said, ‘Look, if you want to play in the NFL someday, you have a great opportunity every day in practice to improve as a passer,’” Saban said during a conference call Wednesday. “Improve your reading, reading coverages, reading the defense, better anticipation — all those things. If you do that, it’s going to help your development tremendously.

“He made a significant amount of progress. I’ve said before, he probably improved more the year he didn’t play than the years that he did as a passer.”

Even for a school that places multiple star recruits at one position with regularity, the dynamic between Hurts and Tagovailoa stands out for Saban and Locksley, who is now the coach at the University of Maryland, where Tagovailoa’s younger brother, Taulia, is the starting quarterback.

Tagovailoa was the No. 1 dual-threat quarterback in the country in 2017 and arrived at Tuscaloosa as a prodigious passer who spent years honing his mechanics under several quarterback gurus, including his father, Galu, and former Hawaii and Atlanta Falcons coach June Jones.

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Hurts, a four-star recruit from the previous year, was the reigning SEC player of the year as a freshman after starring at Channelview High School in Texas under his father, Averion Sr. He ran for 954 yards in his freshman year at Alabama, leading an offense centered on a dominant run game and a play-action passing game to counter it.

When Tagovailoa came into the picture, Hurts wasn’t threatened.

“I never had two players who were really, really good players at the same position that actually supported each other the way that those two guys supported each other,” Saban said. “I think that comes from mutual respect. Both guys were great team guys and put the team before their own personal feelings.”

Said Locksley: “Guys that run away from competition, they don’t survive at a place like ‘Bama. They’re two alphas, they’re both highly competitive guys. I don’t think Jalen batted an eye when Tua committed.”

Hurts held off Tagovailoa throughout the season, but when Alabama went into halftime of the 2017 national championship trailing Georgia, 13-0, the coaching staff made the decision that shaped the future for both of them.

Tagovailoa orchestrated a second-half comeback, throwing four touchdown passes, including the game-winning toss to DeVonta Smith in the corner of the end zone. Locksley pointed out that Hurts was the first one to reach Tagovailoa to celebrate the decisive play, a detail illustrative of the two’s relationship.

“The first guy that was jumping up and down, on the field, hugging Tua was Jalen,” Locksley said. “That sums it up. He still stood tall, head up. ... There’s no doubt that all those guys were supportive of each other, but they were also fiercely competitive. I never saw them make the competition personal. I thought they all handled it well.”

Smith added, “There’s genuine love between those two. Everybody thinks there was a competition, but at the end of the day, it was just about the two of them getting better.”

On the bus ride to the 2018 SEC championship game in December, Hurts went to Locksley with a pointed question.

“What if the roles are reversed today?”

Hurts spent the season to that point doing what Saban and Locksley proposed to him back in September, working to learn a new offensive system that put a premium on diagnosing defenses and making split-second decisions based off which coverage he identified.

It was a system implemented by Giants head coach Brian Daboll, who spent the 2017 season at Alabama as a co-offensive coordinator with Locksley, and originated from the scheme the New England Patriots were running at the time.

» READ MORE: How Giants coach Brian Daboll made a lasting impact on the Eagles’ Jalen Hurts — and Nick Sirianni

Hurts had made meaningful progress. So, with Tagovailoa dealing with a nagging ankle injury going into the game, Hurts asked Locksley to keep him in mind if the game called for it.

“He mentioned to me that he had a dream or something,” Locksley said. “We were going back to Mercedes-Benz Stadium where the switch happened in the championship game [the previous year].”

Against the same Georgia team in the same stadium, Hurts completed seven of his nine passes for 82 yards and a touchdown, orchestrating two scoring drives after Tagovailoa left the game with an ankle injury in the fourth quarter.

After the game, he said it felt like he was “breaking his silence” after a season in which he evaded outside attention. Hurts’ efficiency as a thrower on third down, Locksley said, was the culmination of the months he spent in that silence.

“He focused on developing,” Locksley said. “We said, ‘If you can’t hit the curveball, then you’re going to keep seeing the curveball till you learn how to hit it.’ For Jalen, the aha moment for his development is when he came in for the SEC championship game and converted three third downs with his arm, standing in the pocket, making the throw, and bringing us back to victory.”

After the Eagles’ 34-31 overtime win over the Washington Commanders earlier this month, Hurts explained the role that unusual, pressure-filled moments have played in shaping him.

“My whole career has kind of been a roller coaster in terms of being in different and unique and unprecedented moments,” he said. “Which you may call pressure and stormy and that fire, but that’s what I was born in.”

That 2018 season as Tagovailoa’s backup, however productive it may have proven to be, was one of those moments. The sobering effect of seeing Tagovailoa be “the guy” to the team and the fan base as well as the uncertainty looming in his own football career were enough for some bad days.

“There were days he’d come out and he’d be a little ornery,” Locksley said. “Any player would be that way when you lose your position, but I can tell you he took the coaching and the new system and took full advantage of it.”

Hurts transferred to Oklahoma the following season once he was able to do so without losing a year of eligibility as a graduate transfer. He was the third act to former Sooners quarterbacks Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray, who each won a Heisman Trophy running Lincoln Riley’s Air Raid system with elite production.

» READ MORE: A tarmac, Xbox, and the LeBron Special: How Oklahoma helped Jalen Hurts become the Eagles’ star QB

His performance that season landed him with the Eagles as a second-round pick, facing another adverse — or at least “awkward”— situation as a backup to Carson Wentz during the socially distant 2020 season.

Coming off a Super Bowl LVII loss to the Kansas City Chiefs and, more recently, the second three-interception game of his career, Hurts said his experiences in adverse situations like the ones at Alabama are what he draws on.

“It’s a compound effect of not just those times at Alabama but my whole career thus far,” he said Wednesday. “A number of different experiences, there’s always an opportunity to learn from that. I think I’ve just grown in wisdom and grown as a person throughout my whole entire career.

“Experience is the biggest teacher. So whether it’s an experience last week, two weeks ago or two years ago, whatever it was, it’s always [about] learning and growing to be a better player and person.”

Even after years competing against him, Hurts said Sunday’s meeting against Tagovailoa’s Dolphins doesn’t hold any extra meaning going into the prime-time matchup between 5-1 teams.

He said the two have remained friends and Locksley noted that Hurts visits Maryland a few times a year and spends time with Tagovailoa’s little brother and even talks to him midseason during FaceTime calls.

When asked if he’d reached out to Tagovailoa in the lead-up to the game, Hurts said they likely would catch up after the game instead.

“I know they’re both great competitors, so they’re going to go do what they have to do for their team,” Saban said. “But I think there will be a mutual respect from both guys.”

The Eagles host the Miami Dolphins on Sunday. Join Eagles beat reporters Olivia Reiner and EJ Smith as they dissect the hottest storylines surrounding the team on Gameday Central, live from Lincoln Financial Field.