Jalen Hurts outduels Josh Allen in an Eagles victory for the ages

Jalen Hurts rolled to his left, stopped, squared his hips, and let fly the kind of pass that causes most NFL coaches these days to cringe. Here was an old fashioned quarterback duel Sunday at Lincoln Financial Field, Hurts and Josh Allen going one-on-one, both of them throwing, running, going from god-awful to great, first screwing up, then cooking up chicken parm out of chicken poo, and here was Hurts’ shot to turn their schoolyard-style clash in his, and the Eagles’, favor.

The football kept floating until it landed, eight yards deep in the end zone, in Olamide Zaccheaus’ hands — a 29-yard touchdown, the kind of play that only so many quarterbacks can or would be allowed to make. All these teams now with coaches and coordinators who control every aspect of their offenses, with quarterbacks who can’t be trusted to do anything other than execute the game plan, and Hurts and Allen spent Sunday showing the thrill and creativity that the best of the position still bring. Forget Hurts’ two terrible turnovers in the first half. Forget Allen’s fourth-quarter interception to James Bradberry. Whoever got the ball last was likely to win the game.

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So Hurts and the Eagles got the ball with 5 minutes, 52 seconds left in overtime, and it took them 3:15 of game time to reaffirm that to beat them, you need garlic and a wooden stake and a lifetime supply of silver bullets. Hurts dashed into the end zone from 12 yards out, the Eagles won, 37-34, in a game that will be replayed on NFL Films and on YouTube a few million times over the next several years, and somehow this team is 10-1. Somehow.

“There’s a confidence in this team and in everybody’s capabilities,” Zaccheaus said. “I keep saying it: We know we have to play better, but we also know what we’re capable of and the standard we hold ourselves to. That never wavers, even if it may look a little rough at times.”

This would have been looked at as a terrible loss around here, but it wouldn’t have been. It just wouldn’t. From the standpoint of the standings, a loss to an AFC team isn’t as damaging to the Eagles’ chances of securing home-field advantage throughout the NFC half of the postseason bracket as a loss in either of their next two games would be. The 49ers (8-3) at home next Sunday. The Cowboys (8-3) in Arlington on Dec. 10. Going down in one or both of those games … yes, then the Eagles will be in trouble — not just for their overall record and their conference record and the tiebreaker possibilities, but for the vulnerability they would have shown to those contenders. In the NFC, the Eagles aren’t Rocky Balboa. They’re Ivan Drago, and if they get cut and bleed, they’ll surrender some of their psychological advantage as the favorites in the conference.

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From the standpoint of what happened on the field Sunday, as ragged as the Eagles’ performance was, they were in danger of losing to a player capable of winning a game in the manner Allen almost did: by himself. “[Crap], man, he’s a competitor,” Eagles linebacker Haason Reddick said. “We knew what he could do.”

What he did was play like a man with nothing to lose — 339 passing yards, 81 rushing yards, four touchdowns by ground and air, breaking out of the grasp of certain Eagles defenders, rumbling over others — which he really isn’t. He and the Bills have a lot to lose. They are 6-6 now and will have to vault a handful of teams in the AFC standings to qualify for the playoffs. Expectations for them were so high, and their performance so mediocre through their first 10 games, that they fired their offensive coordinator, Ken Dorsey, and Allen blamed himself for Dorsey losing his job. He was so good for most of Sunday that it seemed he was determined to pay a debt to his old coach and play-caller, to prove that the Bills’ foul-ups in their 5-5 start weren’t Dorsey’s fault.

Hurts was nowhere near that good through the first three quarters, and the only relevant question was whether he, Brian Johnson’s play calls, or Lane Johnson’s last-minute absence with a groin injury was most responsible for the stagnancy of the Eagles offense. (The correct answer: a mixture of all three factors.) But Hurts can make a little magic when he needs to, and he went from appearing slow and unsteady on that bone-bruised left knee to finding A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and finally Zaccheaus for touchdowns in the second half, to moving Jake Elliott just close enough for a 59-yard field goal through rain and wind. Hurts takes the customary ways we evaluate quarterbacks today — the stats, the ratings, the totals — and boils them down to a simple formula: Do you win, or do you lose?

“It’s who he is,” Zaccheaus said. “It’s what he does.” The guy has won 24 of his last 26 regular-season games over the past two seasons. Watch him in those will-testing moments, and you see why.

From halftime on, when the game mattered most, Hurts was Hurts, and he was pretty damn fast on that final touchdown, on the final play of a victory that had to be seen to be believed. The Eagles were down 10 at halftime, 10 in the third quarter, three with less than 30 seconds left in regulation, three in overtime. They only looked dead. They never were. They never are.