Emmanuel Acho had a brief run with the Eagles during the Chip Kelly years. Twenty games, 33 tackles, a fringe guy who dealt with some injuries and was released with a settlement. He’s had some interesting and honest things to say about the NFL since moving full-time into media, but he’s now settled in as a talking head on one of the debate shows and offered up this Jalen Hurts take:

We’ve heard this argument/take in various forms over the past year and a half. Jalen Hurts can’t go play defense against Tom Brady, Justin Herbert, Patrick Mahomes, and Dak Prescott. He can possibly OUTDUEL those guys in a shoot out, but it’s hard to craft this into a serious argument because these guys just aren’t on the field at the same time.

If you wanted to go macro and say “how many good quarterbacks have the Eagles beaten during the Nick Sirianni era?“, then you can absolutely do that. That’s a team-wide indicator of progress, or lack thereof. Beating a Teddy Bridgewater-led team is okay. Beating Kirk Cousins in week 2 this year was much better, but that’s an argument more applicable to Jonathan Gannon and his defense vs. anything Hurts is doing on the other side of the ball.

Jalen Hurts has been one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL this year, statistically speaking and also via the eye test. He passes with flying colors. I know the talking heads have to come up with some shit to discuss, but this specific take has always been rendered incomplete, because you’re trying to link together two things that are intrinsically separate. Acho was reminded of that by his colleague on set: