Can Jalen Hurts ‘weather’ the Packers in Lambeau?
The Eagles are clearly the better team, but Green Bay has a snowball's chance at home. Hurts has had a few uncomfortable games in cold weather before.
MILWAUKEE — Autumn is a really nice time of year in the great state of Wisconsin. Problem is, autumn occurs in August. After that, it’s winter. The real feel temperature was 25 degrees in Green Bay on Sunday afternoon. This is what life is like up north.
If you watched the Bears-Giants game on Sunday, you got a sense of the conditions that could await the Eagles on Monday night when they arrive at Lambeau Field to face the Packers. While there is only a minimal chance of flurries, the forecast has the wind chill hovering around 20 degrees at kickoff and dropping into the teens over the course of the night. Take it from somebody who flew into Milwaukee having packed only a lightweight jacket. The temperature change from back home is startling.
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The weather isn’t the only reason I’m a little leery about the Eagles this week. The Packers are built to win these types of games, more so than they have been in recent years. Through eight games, Jeff Hafley’s defense is allowing the second-fewest yards per play in the NFL. The only team with a better mark, the Broncos, happens to be one of the two teams to beat the Eagles this season. The Rams rank fourth in the NFL in yards per play. The Eagles probably should have lost to them, too.
The folks in Vegas usually know what they are doing, and they’ve made Green Bay the favorite in this one at -1.5 points. If that line holds, the Eagles will enter a regular-season game as an underdog for the first time since Week 12 of last season, when the Ravens went off as three-point favorites. In fact, it will be just the fifth time in their last 34 games — regular season and postseason — that they will be getting points, dating back to Week 14 of 2023. The good news is that the Eagles are 4-0 in those games, with wins over the Chiefs in the Super Bowl plus the Ravens (Week 12, 2024), Bengals (Week 8, 2024), and Saints (Week 3, 2024).
But Lambeau is a different place. The Packers’ 16-13 loss to the Panthers last week was just their second non-division home loss since November 2022. Over the last five seasons, the Packers are 9-3 in regular-season games at Lambeau when the game-time temperature is 35 degrees or lower. The only non-division team to beat them in the cold at Lambeau since 2018 is the Titans in Week 11 of 2022.
“I don’t give a [expletive],” Eagles defensive tackle Jordan Davis said this week when asked about the infamous weather at Lambeau. “At the end of the day, everybody makes a cold weather game bigger than what it is. I feel like if you psyche yourself, you’ve already got your mind made up. ... I played in Chicago. Anything after that, we straight.”
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It’s interesting that Davis brings up Chicago. My caution about Monday night stems largely from that 2022 game at Soldier Field in Week 15. Jalen Hurts threw a couple of interceptions that day and didn’t look entirely comfortable in what was a surprisingly tight game despite the Eagles entering as 8.5-point favorites.
Hurts doesn’t have a ton of experience playing in the cold. His coldest game in 2024 was a Week 16 loss to the Commanders that he left early, completing 1 of 4 passes for 11 yards before getting hurt and giving way to Kenny Pickett.
If that is the case, it would be only the second start of Hurts’ NFL career with a temperature in the 20s and the coldest since Week 15 of 2022, the narrow 25-20 win over the Bears in Chicago.
Hurts’ career sample size isn’t large enough to draw any conclusions. In the 2023 regular-season finale against the Giants, Hurts completed 7 of 16 passes for 55 yards and an interceptions before Nick Sirianni pulled his starters in a damp cold (game-time temperature: 36 degrees). Hurts played great against the Steelers in Week 15 of last season, completing 25 of 32 passes for 290 yards and two touchdowns in a 27-13 win in which the kickoff temperature was 37 degrees. But then, that game was at home.
This one just feels like a weird one to me. The Eagles are the better team. They have the better — and far more consistent — quarterback. They have the more accomplished coach. They have beaten Green Bay twice since the start of last season. They are coming off their bye week, a situation in which Sirianni has been better than any coach in the NFL.
But the Packers have Lambeau.
“I don’t get wrapped up in that,” Sirianni said earlier this week. “We play at a lot of great places. This place, no exception. Obviously, this place has the history that it has, and I have a lot of respect for that, but our job is to focus, to lock in. I mean, the Linc’s an awesome place to play nine or eight times a year. If you get yourself wrapped up too much into that, I think it takes away from the things that you need to focus on. I have a lot of respect though for the history there and what’s happened there and the great teams and players that have played there, just being around for so long. But no, our job is to go in there and to focus on the things that we can focus on and control.”
It’s an admirable sentiment. Still, the Eagles would be wise to dress in layers.