As I was watching Jalen Hurts during Super Bowl LIX, it struck me that there’s an inevitability to his game that isn’t especially easy to quantify.
Hurts is listed as being 6-foot-1 and 223 lbs, and that really sounds like they’re underselling it. He’s a big guy on the football field, sturdy and seemingly capable of taking all measure of punishment a defense can deal out, as his short yardage exploits have demonstrated (Hurts has only missed a handful of games in his career).
Except, being physical is not really his game. He’s not a player who typically looks eager to initiate contact, and when you think of his highlight reel, the top plays don’t generally feature him trucking people with stiff arms and whatnot.
He’s fast, notably so, but not blindingly so, if that makes sense.
You’ll watch him play, and he’ll jump out at you as being just fast enough to burn a defense to the edge for 5-10 yards, but not fast enough or agile enough to turn that advantage into a 50-yard run (unless of course the defense isn’t sound, at which point, yes, like clockwork, he’ll gain exactly the yardage available to him).
Hurts has a good arm, but not the greatest arm. The ball generally gets where it needs to when it needs to, but there’s no wow factor to it either. Guys get open, and he finds them, with decent enough accuracy to get the completion.
He also misses throws, and he gets thrown off by pressure occasionally. And he’s gotten criticism for playing in “simple” schemes, as though making QB reads easier (and taking advantage of them) is a bad thing.
In short, he’s not the biggest, or the strongest, or the fastest, or even the most gifted or cerebral thrower, but here’s the thing:
He feels a little unstoppable.
The “tush push” factors into that a little, I’m sure, but it goes beyond that. And it’s absolutely not purely a physical observation. He’s not a runaway truck or freight train out there. He’s not Ironhead Heyward or Christian Okoye plastering people into the ground.
It’s more like there’s this invisible force propelling him forward that makes his continued movement seem inevitable.
Contrast that with his mercurial opponent on Sunday, the improvisational Patrick Mahomes.
With Mahomes, you literally never know what to expect on any given play. It might be a relatively mundane handoff or incompletion. Or he might throw the ball backwards over his shoulder for a 50-yard touchdown pass.
With Mahomes, it’s basically all on the table on every snap.
Will he fumble the ball away or come up with a way to score the NFL’s first ever 104-yard touchdown pass?
Who knows? But both seem equally likely, regardless of whether everyday physics or simple math dictate the opposite.
To paraphrase Peter Quill, “Something bad, something good, or a bit of both.”
It’s why we love watching him.
Hurts, as dynamic as he can be, never seems to be out of control.
Mahomes might dribble the football at you like a basketball and somehow make it into a net positive, but Hurts is much more likely to run the play exactly the way it was designed, gain the maximum yardage out of it a mortal person can get, and then come at you again on the next play with the same energy.
He’s relentless, but in a specifically controlled way.
It dawned on me sometime after filing my game story that Hurts resembles those little slot cars that zoom around those huge electric racetracks that can take up an entire basement or garage, like toy train sets, except way faster and more entertaining.*
* The speed difference was palpable, and faster was simply better. I loved model train sets. I found them to be utterly fascinating (probably because I never owned one). But I think it was sort of required that you say things like “vroom” as those little cars raced around those tracks. They were so fast!
My good buddy, Clint, had one of those setups in his basement when we were in grade school, and we’d got those little gun-like control sticks and use them to shoot our race cars around and around and AROUND those tracks.
They would keep going, basically forever as long as you never got the speed too out of control or accidentally fishtailed into the other car flying around the track, causing a pileup. Those cars were more about speed and continued pressure than about power, and when they literally stayed on the track (and they usually did), you knew they were going to keep coming and coming.
That’s Jalen Hurts.
“He was poised all game,” Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown said. “He was in control.”
That’s the man’s game. Control.
Go back to his college days and you see it then. Hurts helped shake Alabama coach Nick Saban out of his offensive sleepwalking days, piloting more zone read stuff that gave the Crimson Tide more leverage against their opponents. For that fan base, he was like an oasis in the desert, as Saban had been in danger of being caught up to by his opponents by being too conservative on offense.
Hurts, though, was less explosion and more control (in that way, he was the perfect Saban quarterback). That finally caught up with him when the Tide needed a spark in the CFB Playoffs against Georgia. And so he was replaced in the biggest moment on the biggest stage by the more big-play capable Tua Tagovailoa.
That decision, we all know, netted Alabama another national title. But it also defined Hurts as a player. He wasn’t quite special enough.
Sorry.
This knock has followed him ever since. I’ve seen him called the dreaded “game manager” label and so forth, and I’ve always hated that for him. I’m really genuinely happy for him that he now gets to put a different label on his resume’: “Champion.”
In real time, it felt a little odd that he was named the Super Bowl MVP, because let’s be honest, it was the defense that truly stood out in that game. What they did to the Chiefs offense should be illegal (not really, but that’s a thing people like to say).
You also had Saquon Barkley out there setting NFL records.
Hurts’ numbers were good, though not awe-inspiring. I think what made me reconsider Hurts being “worthy” of the award were Brown’s words about him being in control. Yep, that was it exactly. He was in control, and he was constantly moving his team forward.
It’s fitting he’s here. His forward momentum feels inevitable on the football field, and appropriately, now he’s won the ultimate prize as a result.
In a way, it feels like a wrong has been righted.
It really wasn’t his fault Tua was a freak, or that the Alabama coaches rolled the dice on a risky in-game switch. He was still Mr. Consistent. If they had rolled Hurts back out there instead of Tua, he still would have done some solid things and made plays and kept relentlessly coming, because that’s who he is. We don’t know if Alabama would have won, but I feel really confident in saying they would have scored, several times even.
After all, the slot car racers ALWAYS came back around that track.