Four Games in a Row Without a Jalen Hurts Turnover
Let’s start positive on a Monday morning. Jalen Hurts finished Sunday’s win with a 75% completion rate, going 18 for 24 for 230 yards and two touchdowns, playing a portion of the second half without A.J. Brown. He ran the ball 13 times for 67 yards and a score and didn’t turn the ball over for the fourth-straight game.
The last time he threw a pick or lost a fumble was on 9/29 in Tampa Bay.
After nine weeks, bye included, Hurts is now tied for 22nd among NFL quarterbacks with only six giveaways. He’s two lost fumbles and four thrown picks. You average that out over the course of the entire season and 0.8 giveaways per game is 27th, fewer than Patrick Mahomes, Dak Prescott, Geno Smith, Jordan Love, Aaron Rodgers, and many more.
If you take it a step further and filter it out over the last four games, weeks six through nine, it looks like this (data via Sportradar):
You look at those other guys at the bottom of the list with Hurts and most of them are backups or second unit guys who haven’t played a full season. Tua, for example, just came back from injury. The filters include position players who came in a threw the ball at least once. So if you break it out a little more closely, Hurts is playing lights out alongside guys like Jared Goff and Jayden Daniels, who, unsurprisingly, are also winning a lot of games.
It’s not exactly some profound observation, the turnover thing. But it has to be a bigger talking point, doesn’t it? Not only is the starting QB playing great football, he’s playing clean football, and in a game like the one we watched Sunday, every possession matters. If Hurts loses one fumble or throws one pick, maybe the Eagles are 5-3, and we’re drawing comparisons to the end of 2023, when he couldn’t seem to complete a mistake-free game. It’s no coincidence that the Eagles are 4-0 during a stretch in which they’ve given the ball away once, which was Saquon Barkley’s highly-questionable fumble against the Jags. They have five takeaways in the same time period and and are +4 in turnover differential. It’s the type of football that got them to the Super Bowl in 2022.