Analysis: Jalen Hurts Decides to Ignore Totally Reasonable Jeff McLane Question
The Eagles did media availability on Wednesday, their midweek press conferences ahead of Sunday’s playoff game in Tampa.
Most of the session was rather vanilla. Nobody said anything truly interesting, though there was one awkward exchange between Jalen Hurts and Jeff McLane that was clipped and shared on Twitter:
I love how Hurts continues to shut down McLane because of the shots he’s taken towards the organization in the past. pic.twitter.com/dn1JlgfNw9
— Made For Philly (@MadeForPhilly) January 13, 2022
First things first, the idea that Hurts would “shut down” McLane because of past “shots he’s taken” is 100% false. In fact, the most detailed answer Hurts has given all season long was in response to a question asked by…. Jeff McLane. That was several weeks ago, after the Giants game, when he explained what happened on the play where Dallas Goedert was wide open in the end zone. He went over the defensive coverage and the route progression and all of that stuff. It was incredibly detailed and appreciated.
RE: this question specifically, for context, Jeff is referring to a high school game that Hurts played in 2015. It was the first playoff game of Hurts’ football career, like the first high stakes/big spotlight type of situation. Obviously this week he’s playing his first NFL playoff game, so Jeff is just working on a macro-level story about Jalen’s experience in those big games and wondering if there’s anything going back seven years that might be applied today.
McLane explained it himself in response to another guy:
Well, Jalen is first very guarded, understandably so, but also because of Bama, etc. He likely also didn’t want to talk about the game since they lost, but I was more concerned by what he learned since it was his first in HS and 6 years later he’s playing in his 1st in the NFL.
— Jeff McLane (@Jeff_McLane) January 13, 2022
This really doesn’t amount to much of anything, if we’re being honest. As a guess, Hurts probably was miffed by the question, because he lost that game 72-21. Maybe it brought back bad memories of a bad loss and so Hurts didn’t want anything to do with it, or thought Jeff was trying to tweak him. But McLane didn’t say “hey you guys got your ass kicked back then, what did you learn from it?” It was a question about playing in his first high stakes playoff game and how that prepared him to play other big games in college, and now at the NFL level. More often than not, you’ll get some canned crap in response, like, “it was a good experience and we learned that in a win or go home environment you have to be ready to play and blah blah blah.”
Hurts, like McLane says, is a little guarded with the media. That’s fine. Some of it is the Nick Saban effect, having played at Alabama, where you learn to be defensive and typically short with reporters because they publish “rat poison” or whatever. But at the same time, during the pandemic, these players haven’t had a chance to meet anybody in the media face to face, because the locker room is shut down. Normally you get to know these guys, because the beat writers are there in person and you get to chat off the record or just do basic pleasantries, and that goes a long way towards developing a baseline, two-way respect. You can’t do that on Zoom calls or when you’re sitting at a podium looking at 30 guys that are asking you questions. The human element is gone, and you get these awkward exchanges instead. I guarantee that if there was normal player/media interaction that Hurts would feel more comfortable up there, because he’d have set a basic foundation with the press.
To me, this sequence amounts to a misunderstanding. I’ve been a part of the local media scene for 12 years and studied it for just as long, and most of McLane’s “hard” questions are reserved for coaches and executives, like Howie Roseman. That’s where McLane really gets stuck in and butts heads with people. If Hurts took the question the wrong way, so be it, but McLane’s point wasn’t to bring back bad memories from a tough game. It was a run-of-the-mill “what did you learn” story, a type of article that’s been published since the dawn of creation.
edit – Crossing Broad calls it down the line and always has; don’t give me some shit about “siding with the media”