Nick Sirianni does a day-after press conference every Monday, and this question and answer was interesting:

Jalen Hurts will throw the ball away when he’s out of the pocket, but rarely from within the pocket. Is there a team philosophy against that? Also when he doesn’t like what he sees downfield, obviously you don’t want to take away his ability to scramble, but how do you balance that versus chucking it at somebody’s feet and living to see another day? (Jimmy Kempski)

NICK SIRIANNI: That’s a good question. If you throw the ball away when you’re in the pocket and you’re under duress in the pocket and there is nobody there, it’s going to count as a sack anyway.

I think you’ll probably see more quarterbacks have throwaways when they’re on the run more so than when they’re in the pocket. Jalen has a unique ability that when something happens within the play concept, whether that is a breakdown in protection, whether that’s somebody not getting open, whether that’s our coaching error of not getting guys open in a particular spot, whether it’s a misread, whatever it is, he has this unique ability to get out of trouble and create plays.

I think what you see is, it’s easy to look at, oh, ‘He got sacked this many times’ or ‘He got sacked that many times’ and not account for all the rushing yards that he’s had when he’s been able to extend. It happened three or four times (Sunday) when one of those things happened that I mentioned.

Again, whether it was a breakdown, whether it was a coaching error, whether it was a receiver not getting open, whatever it was, where he scrambled and got a big play out of it and got a positive play out of it.

So you’re going to have a little bit of that balance that there will be times where they finish on the sack as well. And it’s got to be a balance, right? But I know how many plays he’s made with his feet. That doesn’t mean you just extend and make a play running. It’s also the ones that he extends and throws and finds the guy down the field.

Conditions (Sunday) were sloppy, as we know, with the way the field was. Both teams had to play in it. Their pass rush did a good job, too. I thought our O-line did a really nice job protecting. We had a couple breakdowns here and there. But again, like I said, just like when you make a big play, like Saquon’s run, it’s not just on Saquon. It took everybody.

It’s the same thing when there is a sack. It’s on everybody. It’s every part, coaches, players. It’s just the greatest team sport there is. You can’t pin it on anything. Like I said, I know he takes some heat sometimes about taking sacks, but we don’t account for all the times he makes big plays out of it as well.

It’s just a unique ability that he has. There are not a lot of the guys that have it. He’s unique in that and has an unbelievable feel of how to extend plays. And, again, the efficiency that he’s playing quarterback with and the way he’s taking care of the football gives us a chance to win every single week.

Right, so Jimmy is probably talking about the safety from the other day. There was an opportunity to get rid of the ball there, throw it at someone’s feet, maybe avoid the sack that way. He also had a wide-open Dallas Goedert leaking out and didn’t let the ball go, for whatever reason.

Sirianni is essentially talking about a risk vs. reward situation. If Jalen hangs in, he can escape a pocket and make chunk gains with his feet. It’s incredibly valuable. Any Eagles fan with two functioning eyeballs knows this.

But if Hurts can’t escape a collapsing pocket, he’s prone to taking drive-ending sacks, which you saw the other day. That’s the feast or famine nature of a quarterback with great legs who can’t always break free and only ever throws the ball away when he’s running laterally.

We do have a couple of Sportradar stats we can use to add some context to the conversation. You’re basically trying to determine if the scrambling ability is more positive than the sacks are negative.


scrambles

Obviously this stat measures the total number of a times a QB dropped back to pass but ended up running for positive yardage. Hurts finished with 39 scrambles over 15 games, which amounted to 2.6 per. That’s 44.2 scrambles over a full 17-game season and would have been 7th in the league, behind Jayden Daniels, Caleb Williams, Bo Nix, Drake Maye, Lamar Jackson, Brock Purdy, and Baker Mayfield.

dropback + scramble percentage

A combo stat that incorporates passing plays, scrambles, and sacks. Jalen’s number was way down at 36th overall, 47.3%, which is a result of the Eagles running the ball so frequently during the regular season. They just didn’t throw the ball very much.

total sacks

He conceded 38 this year, which was 11th in the league. Hurts and Anthony Richardson were the only quarterbacks in the top 30 of conceded sacks who had a dropback + scramble percentage below 50.

sack yards 

271 sack yards given up for Jalen. 7th in the NFL despite only playing less than 15 full games. It averages out to 7.1 yards lost per sack.

sack percentage

Hurts was sacked on 9.5% of plays this year, which was third-most in the NFL.

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The sack numbers aren’t amazing, but Hurts was 3rd among all quarterbacks with 630 total rushing yards, behind only Daniels and Jackson. Pro Football Focus says that 363 of those yards are from scrambles, which is 6th most in the league, and the other 267 are from designed runs, which is 5th most. By my estimation, if Jalen had played all 17 regular season games, he would have been as high as third in both categories assuming his averages extrapolated as expected.

So there’s your data. You can take that and come to whatever conclusion you’d like to make. Jalen takes some bad sacks, and they have killed drives in the regular season and postseason, but he’s also extended drives with scrambles and done important, improvised things with his legs, which has been the case with him since year #1. Frame all of that within the context of the Eagles having the league’s best running attack, and consider the volume with which scrambles and sacks both take place.

One final note:

Of course, the mindset should probably change situationally, right? There’s gotta be some urgency to get rid of the ball when you’re backed up at your own goal line vs. the risk of trying to escape a busted pocket when you’re at midfield, and it’s not snowing outside.