Jalen Hurts wasn’t great against the Panthers. The Eagles QB will need to be better in the playoffs.

There isn’t a good football term for the kind of quarterback Jalen Hurts is. Game manager is the one that is used most frequently, but it isn’t really an accurate description of him.

Game manager suggests that a quarterback does what he is asked to do within the confines of his team’s offense — and that what he’s asked to do is neither spectacular nor all that difficult. He’s supposed to make the proper reads, the correct decisions, the necessary throws. Except Hurts spent much of the Eagles’ 22-16 victory over the Carolina Panthers on Sunday not doing those things.

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“We did a bad job,” he said, “and that starts with me.”

He took four sacks and had just 108 passing yards and sometimes held the ball too long, hesitating to get the ball to receivers who appeared to be open. Late in the fourth quarter, on first-and-10 from the 50, Hurts gave himself up amid a Panthers pass rush, sliding down to the Lincoln Financial Field turf for a 9-yard loss. His explanation, that he didn’t want to risk an illegal-man-downfield penalty by throwing the ball out of bounds, was confounding. A first-and-15 scenario would have been far better for the Eagles than the second-and-19 situation he created.

On back-to-back plays early in the game, he seemed confused, once dumping the ball to the ground, once scurrying around a little, as if he were mildly disoriented, before getting tackled and losing 3 yards.

On the Eagles’ first offensive play of the day, he had A.J. Brown open on a go route but didn’t throw to him, checking down to Jahan Dotson for a modest gain. “I took my flats,” Hurts said. Later, on a third-down play, Brown lined up wide to the right in single coverage, and Hurts never so much as glanced at him. Whenever A.J. Brown is facing man-to-man coverage, Hurts of course should do more than glance at him. He should throw the ball to A.J. Brown. Even if, before accepting the snap from Cam Jurgens, Hurts had shouted to the entire Panthers defense, I’m throwing the ball to A.J. Brown!, he should still have thrown the ball to A.J. Brown.

Boiled down, Hurts did a lot of puzzling things Sunday, and this was not the first time this season that he has. But then, he also threw two touchdown passes, committed no turnovers, and rushed for 59 yards, including a 35-yard scramble that he ripped off on third-and-10 to extend a drive that led to the winning touchdown. Eagles coach Nick Sirianni is fond of calling Hurts a winner, and perhaps that term is the one that best applies to him. He is certainly contributing to the Eagles’ 11-2 record and their nine-game winning streak, and without him, they wouldn’t be nearly as good — they might not be a playoff team without him — even though he isn’t the primary reason for their success.

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And that’s the cause of whatever queasiness you might feel about the Eagles’ chances of reaching and winning Super Bowl LIX, right? All the other components are in place. The Eagles’ defense had its least impressive showing in a while, given that the Panthers entered Sunday with the 30th-ranked offense in the league, but still surrendered just 16 points. Saquon Barkley rushed for 124 yards on just 20 carries — just, because it felt as if Sirianni and Kellen Moore didn’t give him the ball as much as they could or should have. The Eagles might be the only NFL team that runs the ball to get the lead and throws the ball to protect it. Brown and DeVonta Smith are reliable and dynamic weapons. The offensive line is as excellent as usual.

What’s more, everyone knows that all those components are in place. So whenever there’s a game like Sunday’s, whenever there’s a sense that the Eagles’ offense has plays to be made and isn’t making them, the eyes turn again to Hurts. You didn’t need to be a mind-reader to wander around the Eagles' locker room after Sunday’s game, witness the tight-lipped answers from Brown and Smith and others to direct questions about the passing game, and notice the use of unattributed passive voice in those answers to recognize that Hurts’ subpar performance was an issue. A major one. Someone asked Brown what needed to improve about the offense.

“Passing,” he said.

In one sense, the doubt is unfair to Hurts. He had the best game of his career in the biggest game of his career, two years ago in that narrow Super Bowl loss to the Kansas City Chiefs. And still here the Eagles are through 13 games, and when someone asked Hurts if this disconnection between him and his receivers should exist at this point of the season, he said, “No.” And so everyone is wondering: What will happen if and when the Eagles need more than a game manager or a winner or whatever kind of quarterback Hurts has been this season? What might happen at Ford Field in Detroit during the NFC championship game, or two weeks later at the Superdome? What will Jalen Hurts do then?