Watch this clip and explain to me what’s going on here:

Hurts noted later he was caught “off guard from the last question,” which was odd, but anyway, I transcribed this exchange:

McLane: When you have plays with you under center, you give different looks to the defense, what has that done for the offense these last few weeks?

Hurts: What has it done for the offense?

McLane: Yeah, what has it done?

Hurts: Ima ask you.

McLane: Oh, I mean the question (inaudible) has it helped?

Hurts: I don’t know. Um.. I mean. I really don’t know.

Normally when you get an exchange like this you go back and see if McLane wrote anything negative recently about the interviewee. That’s what happened with Fletcher Cox earlier this year, when Jeff asked him a question and Cox just stared into the camera without saying anything. That, we presume, was the result of a column McLane wrote in the summer about Cox reportedly having a say in coaching decisions and maybe not giving 100% effort.

Jeff did tweet that the Birds were looking to trade Cox this week, though that didn’t materialize. Maybe Hurts was annoyed by that via COX PROXY and decided to be snippy and/or weird with McLane as a result. I don’t see anything Jeff wrote or said about Hurts that was incendiary, so that’s my best guess. The only other thing I can come up with is maybe Hurts just dodging the question because the Eagles look BETTER AND MORE BALANCED when he goes under center, to complement their shotgun looks, and doesn’t want to allude to anything negative RE: Nick Sirianni.*

Update:


*This would seem to be the heart of the matter here. Hurts, we think, is a little hesitant to answer questions about scheme or game plan or whatever, and when you go back over previous press conferences, he’s been a little funky with other reporters. And so maybe he thought Jeff’s question was getting into territory where he was giving up too much, or inadvertently being critical of the offensive coaches, or something like that. Maybe he didn’t want to corner himself and say something that could be perceived as negative.

For what it’s worth, I thought Jeff’s question was 100% fair. I didn’t find it to be “leading.”