Jalen Hurts Only Targeted Three Players in Dallas
I didn’t even realize this until Ed tweeted it:
Nearly 24 hours later, I still can’t believe the Eagles offense only targeted 3 players in the whole game. 3. That’s it. Unreal.
— Ed Kracz (@kracze) December 12, 2023
Does Olamide Zaccheaus count? We’ll put an asterisk on it and say that Jalen Hurts only targeted three players. Braden Mann targeted the WR4.
It’s interesting to think about. Are the Eagles top heavy? If you’ve got two 1,000-yard quality receivers and a bona fide TE1, then you can’t go wrong throwing them the ball over and over and over again.
But it does beg the question of balance. Dak Prescott, for context, targeted eight different players on 39 passing attempts. Hurts targeted A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert on 27 attempts. Dak did focus on five guys mostly – CeeDee Lamb, Michael Gallup, Brandin Cooks, Tony Pollard, and Turd Ferguson, while three other guys got one target each.
Still, Jalen didn’t throw the ball one single time to D’Andre Swift or Kenny Gainwell. There wasn’t an RB screen or dump off all game long. Zaccheaus, Quez Watkins, and Julio Jones played 54 combined snaps and didn’t get a target. Jack Stoll and Grant Calcaterra played 14 total snaps and got… zero targets. And yes, they were in there for some running and option plays, but it’s crazy to me that 12 skill players saw the field on Sunday night and only three of them had the ball thrown their way.
On the season, there’s a pretty significant target drop off after the big three, even with Goedert missing three games:
graphic via ESPN
Running back targets jump out on that image. I went over to SportRadar to look at the data for some corroboration, and believe it or not, the Eagles have thrown 18.2% of their passes to RBs, which is 13th in the league. I thought the number would be much lower, but there’s only 4 percentage points separating 10th from 20th, so there’s a big cluster of teams in the middle. Where the Eagles do drop off significantly is percentage of targets to tight ends, which is 28th in the league, and largely in part due to the fact that Jalen Hurts just doesn’t throw to the guys not named Dallas Goedert.
The other thing that really stands out is that A.J. Brown’s 131 targets amount for 32.5% of Jalen Hurts’ passing attempts, and that number is tops in the NFL. Not even Tyreek Hill and Keenan Allen have numbers that high. Brown is one of just six players getting more than 30% of his quarterback’s total targets.
I don’t think the key to getting the Eagles’ offense going is to chuck it to Jack Stoll and Quez Watkins, but you do wonder what it would look like if Jalen was able to spread the ball out a bit. Does it create more balance? Does it take some of the burden off the top guys? Do we need to see more screens and easy dump offs? These are all reasonable questions to ask.