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Eagles

Three Things to Love About Jalen Hurts’ Cincinnati Performance

Kevin Kinkead

By Kevin Kinkead

Published:

Katie Stratman-Imagn Images

Jalen Hurts played his best game of the season on Sunday afternoon in Cincy, leading the Eagles’ offense to 37 road points and a third-straight win.

There are a lot of places to start with that performance.

You can talk about the deep bomb to DeVonta Smith (we will). You can talk about his success in the running game, even putting the Brotherly Shove to off the side. I personally thought the best thing he did all day was audible to a zone read on the touchdown run where he cooked first-round draft pick Myles Murphy and got a great block from Grant Calcaterra at the second level:

1) You know that play is a zone read and not an RPO because the receivers aren’t running routes. On the left side you see they just go into some dummy motions. Smith drifts backward like they’re setting up an appalling bubble screen, but it’s a field-side decoy and the play is zone read to the boundary side. They’ve really struggled with zone read over the past year or so after having a ton of success with it during the Super Bowl run. Remember the game where they simply left Micah Parsons unblocked and optioned him to death? That’s what I’m talking about. They did the same thing here to put a tight end on a smaller DB in space, and Jalen handled the defensive end himself.

2) Hurts hasn’t turned the ball over since the Tampa game, when he lost a fumble. This is three games in a row now without a turnover and it seems like it should be a bigger talking point. Sure, he’s throwing some darts and reading the field better. He even hit a couple of passes over the middle in this game, mostly short, but one that went for about 20 air yards.

I went through the Sportradar data and filtered quarterback picks and fumbles to include weeks 5, 6, 7, and 8, and Dak Prescott led all quarterbacks in giveaways while Hurts isn’t even on the list:

Obviously it’s a huge deal. It doesn’t require an expert to tell you that giveaways change the game. He’s really cleaned it up in this department, though he probably got away with one when he threw that sideline pass that was almost picked off. Not sure what he was doing there, but it was the only bad play of the Cincy game, I thought.

Hurts finished with a career-high 15 interceptions last year and has thrown four in 2024. If you extrapolate that number, he’s on pace for about nine picks. He’s also fumbled five times and has finished with nine of those in every one of his prior seasons, so the pacing there is a little ahead, but has been cut back drastically over the past three games. During the Super Bowl year, he had six picks and nine fumbles, and you’d assume that if it can get even close to those numbers again this year, the Eagles will be in good shape.

3) Going back to the Smitty touchdown, if you thought it was the longest pass he’s ever completed, you were right:

It looked like a max protect play in real time, but it was not. They went 12 personnel and kept Jack Stoll in as a blocker while Calcaterra ran a deep out. That resulted in six Eagles blocking four Bengals, creating two 2v1s at the line of scrimmage, which gave Hurts plenty of time to throw. A short roll to his right, he stepped into the throw and launched that thing.

The Eagles have 21 receptions of 20+ yards this season and nine runs of 20+ yards. You combine those two facets of the offense and they are 4th in the NFL in plays of 30+ yards and #1 in the league in plays of 40+ yards. Explosion is part of their identity.

Kevin Kinkead

Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com

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