Why Sirianni may be looking at Hurts’ performance differently than everyone else

Why Sirianni may be looking at Hurts’ performance differently than everyone else originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia

If someone told you Jalen Hurts would throw two touchdown passes, engineer three 70-yard TD drives, pass for nearly 300 yards, put up 34 points against a defense that was top-10 in 2023 and rally the Eagles to a win 5,000 miles from home in a game where they trailed four separate times, you’d probably be OK with that.

Hurts really did do some good things Friday night in the season opener, but they were to a great extent overshadowed by a couple inexplicable mistakes.

He threw two interceptions that weren’t the result of incredible defensive plays but simply poor decisions, and he could have thrown two more.

But in his 52nd career start he did enough good things to help the Eagles win a very difficult season opener against a team that was about a minute from the NFC Championship Game last year.

Nick Sirianni pointed to Hurts’ work on the Eagles’ last drive, which took 7 ½ minutes off the clock, resulted in a short Jake Elliott field goal and gave the Packers only 22 seconds to go the length of the field and try to score a game-winning touchdown.

Hurts converted two 2nd-and-longs to DeVonta Smith for first downs on the pivotal drive and also had a clutch eight-yard first-down scramble on a 2nd-and-8.

The interceptions were bad, but Hurts’ ability to bounce back from those sort of mistakes is impressive.

“Yeah, he’s definitely going to want plays back,” Sirianni said. “We all do. He was solely in the moment of, ‘We have a two-point lead, how do we go close this game?’

“So Jalen, that throw on the shallow to Smitty on the second down earlier in that drive and then the slant, he made just really good plays there on both those second downs to get those first downs and continue that drive.

“We gave them the ball back with (22) seconds left down five points with no timeouts. That’s pretty tough to do. I know as an offensive coach…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/why-sirianni-may-looking-hurts-144400996.html

Author : NBC Sports Philadelphia

Publish date : 2024-09-11 14:44:00

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