Jalen Hurts has been great and is unique. But he still isn’t locked in as the Eagles’ ‘franchise quarterback.’

There have been several plays from the Eagles’ 4-0 start that have endeared Jalen Hurts to his coaches, to his teammates, to the team’s fans, but it’s a safe bet that the most endearing of those plays happened last Sunday.

If you watched the game, you know the play without my having to describe it. The Eagles were trailing the Jacksonville Jaguars by 14 points in the second quarter, and on fourth-and-goal from the 3-yard line, Hurts sprinted up the middle, lowered his head and shoulders, and plowed over linebacker Devin Lloyd and into the end zone.

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A quarterback’s sacrificing his body and voluntarily risking injury for a game-changing touchdown: It helped inspire the Eagles to a 29-21 comeback victory, and it was the kind of sequence that can inspire a team to reach or even win a Super Bowl. For the sake of Hurts’ future with the Eagles, it had better be.

With each Eagles win and each excellent Hurts performance, the term “franchise quarterback” will be affixed to him more frequently than it already has. Steve Mariucci, Donovan McNabb, national insiders: All of them and more have apparently determined that Hurts is the Eagles’ guy, will be the Eagles’ guy, or has to be the Eagles’ guy.

This week, Nick Sirianni went on The Pat McAfee Show on YouTube and barked, “He’s a dog!” Doug Pederson texted one longtime NFL writer after Sunday’s game: “He’s a winner. … He thinks he’s the best player in the league.”

That’s Jalen Hurts: tough, willing and able to throw and run, a leader. That’s the kind of player of whom, once upon a time, an NFL team would happily say, That’s our guy.

Once upon a time, though, the league didn’t have a salary cap, and it didn’t have general managers and player-personnel directors who had to balance a lengthy commitment to a terrific player — particularly a quarterback — against the annual cost of that commitment. Here, in this collision course between idealism (and a fan base’s love and appreciation for its team’s QB) and reality, Hurts presents a still-unresolved problem for the Eagles. In the NFL of October 2022, he’s unique in what he does, a fact that can justify either signing him to a multiyear, big-money contract extension or walking away from him, despite the team’s success.

Benjamin Solak of The Ringer published a smart piece this week laying out the reason for this conundrum. With Hurts, because of Hurts, the Eagles have an offense unlike any other in the NFL. Hurts has carried the ball 53 times, which, Solak noted, puts him on pace for 225 carries. That total would shatter the single-season record for rushing attempts by a quarterback: Lamar Jackson’s 2019 total of 176.

Forty of Hurts’ carries have been on read-option plays — shotgun snaps in which he decides whether to throw, hand the ball off to a running back, or run with it himself. That number is the most in the league for any team, by a wide margin.

Another 19% of the Eagles’ plays have been run-pass options — shotgun snaps in which Hurts tucks the ball into a back’s belly and either gives it to him or pulls it back to pass. Only two teams have called fewer under-center rushing plays than the Eagles, and Hurts has thrown a pass after lining up under center just twice all season.

“The Eagles are running a college offense,” Solak writes.

This system is uniquely suited for Hurts’ skill set, of course, but it’s also perfect for maximizing — and I do mean maximizing — his abilities while he is on his rookie contract. Hurts’ salary counts just $1.643 million against the Eagles’ cap this season; he’s so inexpensive that the Eagles could afford to pay Dallas Goedert, trade for A.J. Brown, sign Haason Reddick, and shore up all the areas that needed shoring up.

Yet, despite those additions and improvements, Hurts remains the nexus of the Eagles offense. So much of its success, and their success, is predicated on him, especially his willingness not only to run with the ball but to run with it in the manner he does. Yes, he’s adept at sliding to avoid a big hit, but often, as he did when Lloyd converged on him at the goal line, he invites hard contact and does his best to withstand it and the accumulation of that punishment.

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Strategically, the Eagles’ approach here is smart. They’re not playing like any other NFL team, and by the time an opponent or opponents figure out how to stop them, Hurts, Sirianni, and GM Howie Roseman might be climbing aboard a parade float.

But there’s no getting around this: The clock is ticking on the Eagles, in two regards. A team eventually will devise a way to counteract this offense, and for all of Hurts’ strength and toughness, a system that requires a quarterback to pay so high a physical price is fraught with risk. Perhaps Hurts will demonstrate this season that he is an outlier, so special a player that any team would be foolish not to do whatever it takes to keep him. But at the moment, it’s difficult to separate him from this system, and it’s possible that it will prove impossible to separate him from it.

All of this is to say that, even if the Eagles do win a championship this season, I’m still not convinced that they will commit to Hurts long-term. The way they’re using him suggests they’re going all in with him right now, before they might have to sign him to a second contract, before he might make $35 million, $40 million, $45 million a year — before he becomes a franchise quarterback. Once they pay him at that level, if they pay him at that level, they immediately make it more challenging for themselves to create the conditions that have helped him and them to thrive so far.

The Eagles are wringing every last drop of Jalen Hurts out of Jalen Hurts, and if you’re reading this and pulling out your hair and shouting that the Eagles can’t possibly get rid of a quarterback who won a Super Bowl for them, both you and Hurts himself should remember something: They already did.