In Eagles’ rout of Steelers, Jalen Hurts keeps proving how far he has come as a QB

There were 9 minutes, 24 seconds left in the Eagles’ 35-13 romp over the Steelers on Sunday when the clearest indication of how far Jalen Hurts has come as a quarterback revealed itself: He didn’t take the field. He lingered along the Eagles’ sideline, tossing a football in the air to himself, catching it with his right hand, his helmet off. Gardner Minshew, instead, trotted out to orchestrate the offense.

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Had anyone suggested in August that Minshew would replace Hurts during a Week 8 game with a lopsided outcome, one might have thought that the Eagles’ season had already reached a crossroads. That Hurts’ performance had been so poor that coach Nick Sirianni had benched him. That the team would face a dreaded quarterback controversy in the near future and even harder questions about the position, with long-term ramifications for the franchise, once the offseason arrived. Hurts had been that bad in that wild-card loss in Tampa to the Buccaneers last January. The Eagles had done that much — shifting the entire focus of their offense from the pass to the run, for instance — to indicate they didn’t fully trust him yet. There were still so many reasons to wonder about him.

After Sunday, though, after Hurts threw for 285 yards and four touchdowns, after he did what he could have and should have been expected to do against a lousy Pittsburgh pass defense, it’s becoming more difficult to remember those doubts about him.

“I had faith in him all along,” tight end Dallas Goedert said. “There was a lot of stuff in the air, if Jalen was going to be the guy, but everybody in the building knew he was the guy — he was going to be the guy. That was never a question in any of our minds. Throwing with him all offseason, he was slinging that thing. He was zipping it. Then you start camp, and he starts making checks, making reads, throws on time, goes through his progressions, hits the open guy. It’s fun to see. It’s fun to play when you’ve got a quarterback playing like he has been.”

There was always going to be a chicken-or-egg quality to whatever success Hurts had this season. His salary-cap hit of $1.6 million is so low that the Eagles could afford to acquire A.J. Brown, Haason Reddick, and a host of other contributors. They had on their roster several skill-position players who were young, promising, and already productive: DeVonta Smith, Goedert, Miles Sanders, Quez Watkins. They have arguably the best offensive line in the NFL. It was natural to think that Hurts could and probably should take a step forward, that he would be better than he had been in 2021, when teams practically dared Hurts to drop back and try to beat them. But even if he did improve, how much of it would be because he was a genuinely better quarterback, and how much of it would be because of the Eagles’ improvement around him?

Sunday offered tangible evidence that Hurts has made strides all his own, independent of the favorable circumstances around him. Often, the Eagles rely on him, within their set of read-option calls, to carry the ball himself; it puts and keeps opposing defenders on their heels. Hurts didn’t need to do that against the Steelers, whose defense has been soft against the pass all season. He ran just twice, and the Eagles (if you remove a Minshew kneel-down to end the game) had just 19 rushing attempts all day.

Sixteen of their first 20 plays were called passes. Hurts threw early, and he threw deep. Each of his four touchdowns — three of which were to Brown — was at least 27 yards. He averaged more than 10 yards per pass attempt, and his second and third scoring strikes to Brown were exquisite throws: into tight coverage, catchable by only Brown, perfect in every way.

“If you start from OTAs, when we started working, a lot of it was throwing the ball down the field,” tackle Lane Johnson said. “If teams want to box us in and force us to throw the ball, we have reps on that. We have reps on reps. That’s what we did in training camp. That’s what we did in joint practices. Today, we didn’t really run the ball a whole lot. We didn’t have to.”

That will be the truest test for Hurts once the playoffs roll around: whether he’ll be able to beat a better defense than Pittsburgh’s just with his arm. It was, after all, the primary concern about him last season. That Tampa Bay loss was bad enough to stick in everyone’s mind, but it was merely the culmination of a trend that had been building over weeks — Sirianni leaning more on the offensive line’s dominant run-blocking, having Hurts throw less and less.

Now, they’re winning games because of him, not merely with him, and the irony of Hurts’ development is that this season he has been the very quarterback — smart, in control, delivering big plays without making dumb ones — his predecessor was supposed to become and never has. Hurts didn’t just take Carson Wentz’s job. He has earned the same measure of trust that Wentz was handed and squandered.

“I’ve endured a lot,” Hurts said. “I think I’ve been fortunate to go through things that have built character in me, that have made me a stronger individual, a stronger man, that have allowed me to understand the importance of competition and the importance of seeing something through and the importance of working for what you want. And I’ve just always prided myself on that. ...

“There is no arriving point. You’re never at the point where you say, ‘I’ve arrived.’ There’s only the journey, and I’ve embraced that journey.”

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He is bringing the entire franchise with him on this quest, however long it might last. And with the Eagles now 7-0, with a favorable schedule ahead for the next 10 weeks, maybe the most enjoyable aspect of this memorable season will turn out to be witnessing how much Jalen Hurts has improved, how much he might yet, and what it could mean for this football team.