Eagles

Rhetorical Question: If Jalen Hurts Answered the Knee Question, Would Media Stop Asking About it?

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Nov 2nd, 2023 · 10:28 AM EDT

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Pagan wrote about the Jalen Hurts/Mike Sielski “exchange” on Wednesday. I put “exchange” in quotation marks because it wasn’t much of an exchange at all, just two guys essentially doing their jobs. Sielski is trying to get information that fans might be interested in, while Hurts is, presumably, trying to keep that information in-house. Pagan correctly noted that Hurts “comes from the Nick Saban school of Rat Poison and he graduated first in his class.”

The question is whether there’s anything to keep secret here. It’s been reported by Jay Glazer that Hurts has a bone bruise in his knee. He’s clearly not 100% out there, which anybody with a set of eyeballs was able to discern by simply watching the games. Notable is that Hurts has yet to appear on any injury report, so it would seem as though this is just some typical knock that professional athletes carry throughout the season. They play through various aches and ailments that don’t require reporting. If we listed every single bruise or soreness that the Eagles players are dealing with, the injury report would look like your kid’s Christmas list.

But here’s a rhetorical question –

What if Hurts took the opposite approach instead? What if he came out and answered the knee question? What if he said, “you know what, there’s a little bit of pain when I open up and run, but it’s something I’ve been playing through and it really doesn’t affect my game. That’s pretty much it.” Would that put the issue to bed? There would be no question to ask, since the topic would have been open, addressed, and subsequently shut. There would be no emptiness to fill with baseless speculation. Even if Jalen bullshits his way through it, the topic goes away, and that might be the better PR strategy if he’s sick of being asked about it.

I know that some people believe this amounts to giving ammunition to the other team, but I’m not sure it does. Are the Cowboys listening to the press conference and saying, “okay, we’re gonna go low on the knees now”? I don’t think so, because they already know Hurts has been dealing with something. They’re collecting information on opponents throughout the year. They watch the film. They have connections with national insiders and access to intelligence that we don’t have. Plus, if this was something more than a bone bruise, it would have been uncovered be now.

It’s interesting to look at the Hurts/media relationship from afar. There is a LARGE portion of fans who seem to appreciate Jalen’s brevity with reporters. They think the media stinks, is biased, or is looking to cause trouble, etc, so when Hurts, in their mind, shuts down these questions, it resonates. They see a leader limiting distractions and focusing on the task at hand. And ultimately it really doesn’t matter what happens in these press conferences, because if he throws for 319 yards and four touchdowns, no one gives half a fuck how he answered a Wednesday afternoon question.

One thing that’s a little weird, however, is that this sometimes manifests in confusing exchanges, where he’s asked legitimate questions that he maybe misunderstands, for example when Jeff McLane brought up a 2015 high school game as part of a larger look at Hurts’ experience of playing in the spotlight. That didn’t stick, and resulted in Hurts saying “where we getting at with this?” before moving it on with a “next question.” There’s an awkwardness that again stems from the Nick Saban school of being standoffish with the media.

Anyway, something to think about. Is it a big deal? No, but he could probably shut down the entire thing by taking the opposite of his typical approach.