During the Eagles’ seven-game winning streak, Jalen Hurts has only thrown the ball 153 times. That’s 22.8 attempts per game, coming off a 2023 season in which he threw the ball a career-high 31 times on average.

Why hasn’t he thrown it more this season? Because he doesn’t have to. What an observation! He can hand it off to Saquon Barkley and/or scamper out of the pocket, doing 2022-ish things with his legs to move the chains and keep drives alive. As a result, he’s solved the turnover problem that plagued him last year and has now gone six of seven games without a giveaway. He lost a fumble in Dallas and threw an interception while looking into Jerry Jones’ sun glare, but made it through LA, Washington, Jacksonville, Cincy, New York, and Cleveland without turning it over once.

As such, he is now a game manager, sort it. What does that even mean? Well, he makes smart decisions and protects the ball while getting it into the hands of playmakers, resulting in a lower volume for himself. There’s nothing wrong with that.

We used to think of “game manager” as a derogatory term, because it came with the insinuation that the quarterback was hindered by some shortcoming, i.e. you had a noodle arm or weren’t very mobile in the pocket. The QB “manages” the game because he can’t take it over himself, which is antithetical to what we’ve thought about Jalen Hurts over the years, and in 2024, still. He’ll rip off a huge run here, a sideline bomb there, and hit on enough explosive plays to prove that he can change the course of a game on his own. In that sense, he’s not a Trent Dilfer or a Brad Johnson, two Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks who handed the ball off, made low-risk passing attempts, and had generational defenses shutting down the opposition.

The key point in all of this is that Hurts just sort of ended up being a “game manager.” I don’t know if anyone on the planet predicted Saquon going nuclear this season, but a team with A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith wouldn’t exactly get away from the passing game on purpose. Hell, Howie Roseman went out and signed Jahan Dotson late in the summer to complete what we thought might be the best receiver trio in the National Football League. They’ve leaned on Barkley because you stay with the hot hand, but if we reach a point where the run game gets stuck, you’ve got a pair of 1,000-yard receivers + Dallas Goedert making up 27% of the starting offense.


One other thing that loosely defines a “game manager” is completion percentage, and at 69.1% through 11 games, Jalen is riding a career high. His best previous number was 66.5%, back in 2022. Typically you’d then look at a passing grid and see a bunch of dink and dunk stuff, or Tom Brady-esque quick hitters to Julian Edelman and Wes Welker-style receivers, but Hurts’ charts look more like this in 2024:

You see a smattering of short tosses, mostly outside the hash marks, and in this case 10 of his 16 passes were thrown within 10 yards or behind the line of scrimmage. But then there’s a bomb mixed in, or a sideline shot for Brown or Smith and it reminds you that while he’s playing a cleaner game this year, checking it down to Saquon, and chucking it out of bounds when necessary, that deep ball is still there, and always will be. Plus, guys like Dilfer, Johnson, and Alex Smith weren’t giving you 600 yards on the ground. What game managers were running empty set draws?

It’s hard to say how much of the cleaner Jalen this year is a result of him solving his own problems vs. Saquon taking some responsibility off of his plate, but no matter the genesis, the results are there. The Eagles are 9-2, Hurts is protecting the ball, running it well, and hitting the occasional big play, and the Birds have the #1 rushing attack in the NFL. Throw in a better-than-expected defense, and it’s why people are calling for “NFC Championship or bust” on Thanksgiving week.