When the Eagles won the Super Bowl, it brought back chatter about Jalen Hurts’ 2020 draft selection, which was criticized at the time. Now you’ve got a smattering of declaratory statements out there.

“I guess it was a great draft pick after all!” “Howie nailed it!” You’ve seen stuff like that floating around.

Of course, selecting the guy who would go on to become Super Bowl MVP is a great pick, when you look at it in a vacuum. But you can’t look at anything in a vacuum, because nothing actually exists in a vacuum.

So in preparation for your water cooler and/or internet discussions this week, here’s the context surrounding the draft pick and why people didn’t like it at the time:

  1. In June of 2019, the Eagles signed Carson Wentz to a four-year, $128 million contract extension with $107 million guaranteed.
  2. Wentz didn’t have many weapons in the passing game that year. His top three receivers in total yardage were Zach Ertz, Dallas Goedert, and Miles Sanders. Alshon Jeffery and Nelson Agholor finished with fewer than 500 yards.
  3. The consensus was that since the Eagles had committed to Carson, and finally moved him out from under Nick Foles’ shadow, that they would help him in the 2020 draft and get him some receivers.
  4. They took Jalen Reagor in the first round, which ended up being a miss.
  5. Hurts was drafted in the second round, considered a bit of a reach at the time because most of the experts had him projected somewhere in the late 2nd/early 3rd. He may have been there for them in the third round. The Eagles really needed defensive help too and fans were wondering why they didn’t go for Logan Wilson or Jeremy Chinn or A.J. Epenesa.
  6. They missed on third round pick Davion Taylor.
  7. Fourth rounder K’Von Wallace played special teams but never panned out at safety.
  8. Fifth rounder John Hightower and sixth rounder Quez Watkins didn’t provide much.
  9. The Eagles obviously liked Hurts but weren’t going to start him over their recently-extended franchise QB, so they put him in to run bullshit Taysom Hill gadget plays, which was insulting to anyone who had watched Jalen play a high-level, dual-threat game at Alabama and Oklahoma.
  10. Wentz didn’t play well in 2020 and was benched. It was obvious they had to get off his contract.
  11. The Eagles suffered through a four-win season and fired Super Bowl winner Doug Pederson.
  12. Sal Paolantonio put on his Kenesaw Mountain Landis pants to investigate the Birds for tanking the final game of that season, improving their draft pick.
  13. Howie flipped Carson to Indy and got back a really nice haul, the assets stretched and used in the acquisition of A.J. Brown, Jalen Carter, DeVonta Smith, and Cooper DeJean.
  14. They got the next three year’s worth of draft picks right, providing Hurts with a really good offensive line and two top receivers.
  15. All the while, Wentz’s dead money disappeared and Howie worked the salary cap with a combination of shrewd free agent signings and dummy year manipulation.

The whole point of going through that is to provide a reminder that the only reason this all worked out for the Eagles is because Howie Roseman was able to dig himself out of a massive hole that he himself dug. It would have been one thing to draft Hurts, give him the reins on day one, and let him start slinging it. But that’s not what happened. They had just extended Wentz and trudged through a horrific losing season in which Hurts was only in the game to run QB powers and other nonsense. It was a logjam of their own making and we didn’t actually get to see Jalen be himself until he started those games following Carson’s benching.


If you recall, Eagles fans were in consensus that Hurts was a quality player and someone they liked, they just didn’t think drafting him in the second round made a lot of sense because of the preceding moves the front office had made.

So the proper way to tell the story is that Howie Roseman and Jeffrey Lurie got it right by identifying Jalen Hurts as a winner and someone they needed on their team. But they had to essentially tear it down and build it back up, hire a new coach and get it to a point where Hurts was in a position to succeed, with a great team surrounding him. Howie pulled off a brilliant Houdini act to make it all possible, but there was a time in the not-too-distant past when the fan base wanted him gone.

EDIT – Tim made a good point. Wentz had injury history at the time of the Hurts draft pick, and based on the success of Foles during the Super Bowl year, it was justifiable to make sure they put resources into the backup position