Crossing Broad
Jalen Hurts played his best game of the season on Sunday afternoon in Cincy, leading the Eagles’ offense to 37 road points and a third-straight win.
There are a lot of places to start with that performance.
You can talk about the deep bomb to DeVonta Smith (we will). You can talk about his success in the running game, even putting the Brotherly Shove to off the side. I personally thought the best thing he did all day was audible to a zone read on the touchdown run where he cooked first-round draft pick Myles Murphy and got a great block from Grant Calcaterra at the second level:
Eagles @ Bengals: ¡EN ESPAÑOL
@RR_RicardoFAN @OscarBudejen @ElGringoMalo365 @KCTicoSports
1. ¡TOUCHDOWN FILADEEEEEELFIA!
¡JALEN HURTS! pic.twitter.com/dXP6KZjk3C
— Nick Piccone (@_piccone) October 27, 2024
1) You know that play is a zone read and not an RPO because the receivers aren’t running routes. On the left side you see they just go into some dummy motions. Smith drifts backward like they’re setting up an appalling bubble screen, but it’s a field-side decoy and the play is zone read to the boundary side. They’ve really struggled with zone read over the past year or so after having a ton of success with it during the Super Bowl run. Remember the game where they simply left Micah Parsons unblocked and optioned him to death? That’s what I’m talking about. They did the same thing here to put a tight end on a smaller DB in space, and Jalen handled the defensive end himself.
2) Hurts hasn’t turned the ball over since the Tampa game, when he lost a fumble. This is three games in a row now without a turnover and it seems like it should be a bigger talking point. Sure, he’s throwing some darts and reading the field better. He even hit a couple of passes over the middle in this game, mostly short, but one that went for about 20 air yards.
I went through the Sportradar data and filtered quarterback picks and fumbles to include weeks 5, 6, 7, and 8, and Dak Prescott led all quarterbacks in giveaways while Hurts isn’t even on the list:
Obviously it’s a huge deal. It doesn’t require an expert to tell you that giveaways change the game. He’s really cleaned it up in this department, though he probably got away with one when he threw that sideline pass that was almost picked off. Not sure what he was doing there, but it was the only bad play of the Cincy game, I thought.
Hurts finished with a career-high 15 interceptions last year and has thrown four in 2024. If you extrapolate that number, he’s on pace for about nine picks. He’s also fumbled five times and has finished with nine of those in every one of his prior seasons, so the pacing there is a little ahead, but has been cut back drastically over the past three...
