Game Changers: How Jalen Hurts' Football Life Shaped Him Perfectly To Be the Eagles' QB

Jalen Hurts had lost control. 

Too caught up in the excitement, too blinded by the moment, he thrust his hands in the air, let out a scream, and went streaking down the sidelines to celebrate in the end zone.

There was just one problem. He wasn’t a player. He was the ball boy for a high school football team coached by his father and quarterbacked by his brother. He was working, and he forgot to do his job.

"You’re not there to be a fan," Byron Henderson, Channelview High School's offensive coordinator, remembers telling him. "You’re not there to watch the game. The referee calls for a ball, you need to give him a ball.

"So, his very first game he was a little excited. And after the game, we told him, ‘Hey, we need you to calm down.’"

It was understandable, though. Averion Hurts Jr., Jalen’s brother, had just thrown a 50-yard touchdown pass. And Jalen was about 10 years old.

That might actually be the last time anyone has had to tell the now-27-year-old Hurts that he needed to calm down and keep his emotions in check. In the years since, he has methodically turned himself into one of the most stoic, unbothered, unflappable athletes in the world. The quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles has become remarkable not just for all he’s achieved, but for the stone-faced, even-keeled way he’s handled all of it — the good and the bad.

And that includes the highest of highs — the Super Bowl championship he helped the Eagles win just 11 months ago. And it includes the lowest of lows — when he was famously benched at halftime of the 2018 College Football Playoff National Championship as a sophomore. Throughout it all, and as he leads the Eagles on their quest to repeat as champs — which begins in earnest Sunday when they host the San Francisco 49ers in the wild-card round (FOX, 4:30 p.m. ET) — Hurts’ expression has remained steely, his voice has stayed near a whisper, and his words have purposely never given the world more than a hint of what might be bubbling underneath.

His teammates call that consistency "very reassuring," as Eagles left tackle Jordan Mailata said. His personal trainer, Taylor Kelly, told me it’s the kind of intense focus and "competitor’s eye" that only the greatest athletes — such as Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant — seem to have. Henderson, his former high school offensive coordinator, told me, "honestly and truly, he gets it from his dad," who was also his head coach at Channelview High School in the suburbs of Houston, Texas.

Hurts' dad, though, admitted he himself can’t quite figure his son out.

"I tell people that he’s different," Averion Hurts Sr. told me. "Going to visit colleges, I’d tell coaches, ‘He’s a different cat.’ Their question would be, ‘So, what do you mean?’ I’d just say, ‘I can’t explain it. You’ll just have to see. He’s different.

"He’s always been locked in. I don’t know how or why. He just is, man."

First flight

The knock at the door came every day around 5:30 p.m. School was over and so was football practice, and Henderson would be ready to head home for dinner or to see his family. But like clockwork, his sophomore quarterback, just 15 years old, would be at his door asking, "Where you going? I thought we could watch some more film."

Henderson told me that he honestly found it "exhausting." But "you don’t want to tell a kid ‘No.’ If a kid wants to get to work. You want to give the kid the work."

And if there was one thing he knew about young Jalen Hurts, it was that the kid wanted to work. Hurts had been doing drills on the field at Channelview from the time he was 7 years old — dreaming, it turns out, of being a receiver, not a quarterback like his older brother. Once the coaches convinced him to play quarterback — "'Well, who’s going to throw you the ball?'" Henderson remembers asking him — the work only intensified. He showed up at their summer camp as a freshman, not even officially on the varsity team yet, and he caught the eye of both the staff and the upperclassmen with his never-ending drive.

"All summer long he’s there, and he’s leading the group," Henderson said. "He’s not getting in line. He’s in front of the line."

"It's real easy for people to say ‘Well, his dad is the coach.’ Unfortunately, I know whole lot of coaches’ sons who don’t want to lead, don’t want to be first in line, don’t want to be the first in the building, don’t want to be the last to leave."

His teammates noticed, which is why they didn’t blink when Hurts played a little as a freshman — a "big deal," Henderson said, even for a struggling 6A program in Texas. By the time he was a sophomore starter, his teammates were ready to follow him anywhere, do anything he wanted to do. And so when he knocked at Henderson’s door looking to watch more film, Hurts didn’t mean right away. First, he wanted to get in some extra practice on the field with his teammates — and all those kids were ready to extend their day to put in the extra work, too.

"Once he became a sophomore, my life changed," Henderson said. "I played quarterback for Texas Southern and I thought that was an achievement for me. But my dad used to always say, 'You don’t work hard enough.' And I never understood what it meant, because I never missed practice, I always did what the coach told me to do, I was at every workout. 

"But I never did the extra things. Jalen showed me what ‘work hard enough’ means."

The work paid off when Hurts did something that no other Channelview quarterback had done in 22 years — not even his older brother. He led the Falcons to the Texas high school playoffs. It was a huge accomplishment considering they went 1-9 when Hurts started as a sophomore, and were a program that Henderson noted was "not very prominent if you think about Texas high school football."

Hurts was the catalyst for the turnaround, tallying 1,391 rushing yards and 2,384 passing yards with a combined 51 touchdowns while playing behind a dramatically undersized and overmatched offensive line. He was a force of nature and had established himself as one of the best dual-threat quarterbacks in the country.

But despite the success and attention from college coaches, his dad was always right there to make sure to keep his ego in check.

"You go through things and you can be sitting on top and you start smelling yourself, as they say, then all of a sudden it’s gone," Hurts' father told me. "So if you just don’t get too, too excited, if you do hit some bumps in the road, then it’s not something that’s going to totally derail you."

Built by a benching

The moment that could have derailed him — maybe should have derailed him — came on the biggest stage. Jalen Hurts had forced his way onto the field in the season opener of his freshman year, and led the Crimson Tide all the way to the national championship game, where they lost a thriller to Clemson. But the real hardship came exactly 12 months later. 

"His freshman year had been so easy for him," Henderson told me. "So in his mind, he’s like, ‘Shoot, what’s next? Heisman? Going to win the national championship this year?’ That’s where his mind was.

"Well, he didn’t have a very good [sophomore] year. It all led to the benching. And it humbled him. Not just defined him. It hurt him."

The benching came at halftime of his second national championship game, with his team trailing 13-0. And, with cameras focusing on him on the sidelines, he had to just stand there and watch as Tua Tagovailoa, a true freshman, took his job and rallied Alabama to an overtime victory over Georgia. It was a public humiliation in what should have been his moment of triumph. 

At the time, he was only 19 years old. And there was nowhere for him to hide.

"That was the first set of adversity that could’ve killed him," Eagles defensive end Brandon Graham told me. "So I always feel like for him, he knows he’s been there before. It don’t always feel good when you have to go back to that. But you know you’ve been built for it.

"I think that he was built for it."

And, in many ways, he was built by it.

"I remember watching that for myself, thinking, ‘This could go one or two ways," Kelly, who wasn’t yet Hurts’ personal trainer, told me. "How are you going to respond? And when you get the opportunity to get back in, what are you going to do with it?"

"I was very worried. Extremely," Henderson told me. "Because I know how hard the kid worked and I know the conversations we had before that. So that benching … I was afraid was going to break him. 

"But he had his dad."

There were tears shed after the benching, but Father and Son don’t like to dwell on those. Averion Hurts Sr. just wanted to be there for Jalen, both as a father and as a coach. And as both, he wanted to make sure his son, and his former player, learned from this harsh lesson in reality.

So he did whatever he could to make sure Jalen would emerge even stronger on the other side.

"Of course it hurt," Averion Hurts told me. "But you can’t just sit there. Worrying’s not going to fix it. You just got to figure out what you’re going to do next and move forward."

By the time Jalen was ready to move forward, his dad was ready, too. He had a folder filled with research and information about coaches, schemes and programs so he could help figure out what was the next best move for his son. He helped convince Jalen to spend one more year at Alabama, even if he had to back up Tagovailoa, to learn under head coach Nick Saban before he moved on.

"Him staying at Alabama, that wasn’t by chance," Henderson recalled. "That was calculated because, at the time, it was the best thing for him. Everyone’s telling him to leave. Everybody. Even my first thing was, 'S---, where are we going?’ And his dad was like, ‘Not so fast.'"

To his dad, the lesson was the most important thing — the idea that some things you just "[have] to go through." He insisted to his son that "perseverance" is what would matter most in the end. It’s the embodiment of a motto Jalen got from a friend: "So what? Now what?" 

Or, as his dad explains, "Basically, when adversity happens, now what are you going to do?"

"They say he got benched because he wasn’t throwing the ball well. Well, he wasn’t," Hurts' father told me. "And so it happened. But the outcome at the end, it’s not where you started, it’s where you finish. And I didn’t think he was done yet."

Hurts ended up staying one more year at Alabama. He played sparingly, but he did have a moment where he replaced an injured Tagovailoa to, fittingly, lead a comeback win over Georgia in the SEC Championship Game. Hurts then transferred to Oklahoma, where he threw for 3,851 yards, ran for 1,298 and led the Sooners to the Big 12 championship and the College Football Playoff and emerged as a second-round pick in the 2020 NFL Draft.

He had been humbled, and he survived. He even thrived. And he learned what big-time sports were really about along the way.

"It’s a case where that situation was self-inflicted," his dad told me. "Sports is a performance-based business. You perform, you play. You don’t, you don’t. That’s just how it goes. Everyone has to hold up their end of the bargain. I think it’s something that helped continue his maturation process.

"The tears were there. But that’s not going to fix it. So you get rid of that and figure out the next step. What are you going to do now?"

Heavy is the head that wears the crown

Kelly always knows what Hurts is going to do next, whether he’s knocked down by a performance or questioned by outsiders. The former Arizona State quarterback can see the look in Hurts’ eyes when he trains him during the offseason at 3DQB in Huntington Beach, Calif. He’s seen it at press conferences, in photos, and when cameras zoom in on his star pupil during games on TV.

Hurts would never admit to being affected by circumstances or doubters. But Kelly knows.

"Whenever you doubt him, I don’t even know how to say it: He just proves you wrong," Kelly told me. "He’s not necessarily using it as fuel. It's not like he’s thinking, ‘Man they said I can’t throw the ball.’ You never hear him say any of that. He just gets this look in his eye and you’re like, 'Oh, alright. It’s on. Good luck, everybody.' 

"When you see that in a competitor’s eye … There’s very few. Steph Curry’s got it. LeBron has it. Jordan had it. Kobe. When you see that look in somebody’s eyes, it’s like, ‘OK, it’s about to be a long night for somebody.’"

It’s the approach Hurts takes to training with Kelly — 2-3 times per week in the offseason, starting just a few weeks after the Eagles’ season ends. Kelly said it’s "challenging" to train a driven player like Hurts, who pushes the trainer to drill him on small things that others might overlook. Sometimes, he said, they might work on how Hurts moves his hips as he runs to his left, or the amount of movement in his neck when he throws on the run to his right.

He finds his own flaws, however small they might be, and insists they find a way to fix them.

"When those guys get to that point, they’re looking for that one percent in an offseason," Kelly said. "What’s that one percent that I can get better at?"

But that desire comes from within, not from the doubters on the outside. And that’s good, because the doubters are always everywhere around Hurts. He was the MVP of Super Bowl LIX not even a year ago, but when he threw four interceptions during a 22-19 loss on Monday Night Football to the Los Angeles Chargers in early December, it was like he was instantly deleted from every list of elite NFL quarterbacks. Fans were booing him. The entire city of Philadelphia seemed to be wondering what was wrong with him. 

There were even public cries for him to be benched.

"I think that playing quarterback in the NFL, you're going to get a lot of attention — positive, negative, all attention," Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said. "When that happens, any little thing [that can] distract you, you need to block out. I think that's why Jalen can handle it so well is because he’s so locked in and focused and not distracted by things to be able to lock in onto what he needs to do to get himself ready to play."

Linebacker Nakobe Dean added: "Since he's been in the league, it seems like he's on top of the mountain one day in the public eye, and in the next they're trying to bury him. And you just see a guy that comes in with the same resolve, the same mindset each week to work and get better."

His longtime teammates have learned to be able to tell when things are really bothering their quarterback. But they also know he prefers to handle it privately. And usually he handles it by just going back to work.

"Sometimes he beats himself up," Graham told me. "But I think that for the most part, who doesn’t? You have people that you can go to in those times. But the biggest thing is, when you don’t listen to the noise, you can really focus because that’s just a distraction. I think he does a great job of not worrying about that part, but sometimes it’s more [about] yourself as a critic than everybody else."

Or, as Graham also put it, "It’s heavy to wear that crown, man. A lot of people think they want that crown until they see how heavy it is."

It can feel heaviest in a city like Philadelphia, especially playing for a franchise where the expectations have become incredibly high.

‘A different cat’

Hurts, by any measure, is one of the winningest quarterbacks in NFL history. He’s got a 57-25 regular season record as a starter since he succeeded veteran Carson Wentz as a rookie in 2020, for a robust winning percentage of .695. He’s led the Eagles to double-digit wins in each of the past four seasons and taken them to the playoffs in each of his five full seasons as a starter. He’s got a playoff record of 6-3, too, and has taken them to the Super Bowl twice. And both times he was outstanding, including when he threw for 221 yards and two touchdowns and ran for 72 yards and a touchdown in their 40-22 rout of the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX last year.

He's a dangerous, dual-threat quarterback, and is often hailed as a remarkable leader inside a star-studded locker room. But the doubters are clearly there. Sometimes it's just part of playing for a demanding and skeptical fan base in Philadelphia. But sometimes the skeptics have been on his own team, like when No. 1 receiver A.J. Brown singled out "passing" as what the Eagles needed to improve on most late last year. And nationally, he rarely gets recognition as an elite player. He’s been an All-Pro just once (2022, on the second team) and has gone to the Pro Bowl only twice (2022, 2023).

The focus with him is often on what he doesn't do, maybe more so this season than ever. But the offense as a whole has struggled under the direction of Kevin Patullo, the Eagles' fourth offensive coordinator in the past four seasons. The club ranked 19th in scoring (22.3) in the regular season and failed to score 20 points in eight games. 

While Hurts threw for a career-high 25 touchdowns with only six interceptions, his rushing totals (421 yards, eight touchdowns) were his lowest ever as a starter. And there were two games this season when he didn’t complete a single pass in the second half. Philly, interestingly, went 9-0 when Hurts threw for less than 200 yards.

That’s why, heading into the postseason, there is a feeling that the Eagles will only go as far as their defense carries them, that their Hurts-led offense has become a liability to their title defense. And that could be a problem in an NFC field loaded with the Seahawks, Rams, Bears and 49ers—four of the 10 highest-scoring teams in the league.

Hurts may be the reigning Super Bowl MVP and just 11 months removed from a parade down Broad Street, but the faith in him entering the playoffs feels unusually low.

"Society is blinded by aesthetics," Henderson told me. "We want it to look a certain way. We don’t want to hear about you throwing 135 yards and two touchdowns. You all are winning, but that ain’t what we want to see. We want to see Patrick Mahomes go out there and run around for two minutes and then launch a ball, or Lamar Jackson shake two or three people and take off running. That is aesthetics for people. 

"Whereas true football people, we don’t care. We want the win."

And that, in the end, is all Hurts wants, too. Kelly remembered watching on television last February as a camera followed Hurts down a hallway before the Super Bowl. Hurts stopped to look at the pregame show that was airing, where every analyst had just picked the two-time defending champion Chiefs to win.

"The cameras caught him shrugging a little bit and looking at the screen," Kelly told me. "I knew exactly what was in his mind. ‘OK, they’re doubting us.’ That’s probably the worst thing you can do, because it’s just adding motivation to him."

That was a rare moment where the world caught a glimpse of what was really on Hurts’ mind. There was another a few weeks ago, in a 31-0 rout of the Raiders, when Hurts celebrated his third touchdown pass of the day — a 27-yard strike to Brown — with a primal screen and several pumps of his fists and arms.

That the unusual outburst came one week after his four-interception nightmare, just days after some called for his benching, wasn’t lost on anyone at all.

"It’s not that he needs (the doubts)," Kelly told me. "It’s just like, ‘Alright. If that’s what you want to do, OK. Here we go.’ That is a trait that you either have or don’t. Some people, they know how to handle that type of criticism or those moments and it’s just an innate behavior to go and prove everyone wrong."

With Hurts, it seems both innate and acquired. It comes from his experience. It comes from who he is. And it comes from the knowledge of what his father told me he once told his son: "With more responsibility comes more expectations."

In other words, the world is always watching — maybe now more than ever. And Hurts knows it, too.

"Everybody's watching. It just comes with it and it hasn't changed," he said. "I think everybody needs to remember where I come from and how I'm built. I just want to lead in the right way, set the right example. I've done the same thing since I went to University of Alabama and everything that has been in front of me, so it's no different now."

That is, after all, the way he was coached and raised. It's as if he spent a lifetime specifically preparing to be the quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles, learning how to shrug off the doubts so he could make another Super Bowl run.

"It honestly doesn’t faze him," Henderson told me. "It’s not an act. Everything he went through makes him the perfect quarterback for Philadelphia. Because that is one harsh town when it comes to sports.

"The kid is just bred differently."

He can thank his dad for most of that. Hurts clearly took every lesson he was taught to heart.

"I coach that way," his father told me. "Now the emotion will come out for the bad, and you’re going to always cheer for success. But as for just being overly emotional, it’s always been, ‘Don’t get too excited with the highs or too down with the lows. Stay even-keeled, so you don’t have too far to come down or too far to go up.'

"He just kind of takes it to another level. Yeah, he’s a different cat."

Ralph Vacchiano is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He spent six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him on Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.

Want great stories delivered right to your inbox? Create or log in to your FOX Sports account, follow leagues, teams and players to receive a personalized newsletter daily.