Jalen Hurts is officially The Man for the Eagles. History says the hard part is ahead.

The Eagles have done this before. They have done with Jalen Hurts what they did with Donovan McNabb, with Michael Vick, with Carson Wentz. Whenever Jeffrey Lurie and his brain trust — Joe Banner, Andy Reid, Howie Roseman — have thought that they have found The Man at quarterback, they have paid him like he is The Man.

This has been Lurie’s overriding approach to team-building and brand-building for years. Great quarterbacks are gold, not just because of the games and championships they win but because of the merchandise they move and the pop-cultural lines they cross. It’s no coincidence that Robert Kraft and the Patriots have been Lurie’s inspirational model for the Eagles, and the reasons go beyond the fact that Lurie is a native New Englander. The Patriots became the NFL’s best and most polarizing franchise, truly America’s team, after they happened to draft Tom Brady in 2000. Brady elevated the Patriots out of irrelevance and into the watercooler conversation (back when there were watercoolers and in-person conversations around them), and even after winning a Super Bowl with a backup quarterback and not one of the league’s megastars, Lurie has kept on chasing that dream, though he may never find it.

For Hurts, that philosophy has reportedly earned him a five-year contract extension — one that could pay him as much as $255 million, one that guarantees him more than $179 million, one that includes, in a first for the franchise, a no-trade clause. That philosophy also means, if history is any indication, that Hurts is entering a new stage in his career, with a new perception of him, with new and additional pressure on him.

» READ MORE: How the Jalen Hurts extension impacts the Eagles’ salary cap situation and resets the NFL’s QB market

Each of those quarterbacks — McNabb, Vick, Wentz — went through a similar rite of passage to the one now Hurts must negotiate, and it’s useful to examine the timing, context, and results of those situations to understand what is and might be ahead for Hurts and the Eagles.

In late September 2002, three weeks into the NFL season, the Eagles and McNabb reached an agreement on a 12-year contract extension that could have been worth up to $115 million. As star-crossed and controversial as his career here turned out to be — the boos that greeted him when the team drafted him in 1999, his tumultuous relationship with Terrell Owens, the team’s NFC championship game failures, its loss in Super Bowl XXXIX, and the questions around his gastrointestinal sturdiness — McNabb was at the apex of his popularity when he signed that extension.

Already, he was a centerpiece of a nationwide marketing campaign for Chunky Soup, appearing in a series of TV commercials that were, for a time, ubiquitous. He had just led the franchise to its first NFC East title in 13 years and its first appearance in the NFC championship game in 20, and the sight of him standing near a tunnel at the Edward Jones Dome after that championship game, watching the St. Louis Rams celebrate their 29-24 victory, became a symbol of his commitment to leading the Eagles to glory. It was only a matter of time, right?

It was not only a matter of time.

When Vick signed a six-year extension with the Eagles in August 2011, the deal’s average annual value was higher than Eli Manning’s and Philip Rivers’ and a tick below Brady’s and Peyton Manning’s. His was a remarkable journey, more improbable even than the one that Hurts has made since the Eagles drafted him to Wentz’s backup in 2020. Vick had remade himself and resurrected his career after an 18-month prison stint for lying about operating a dogfighting operation.

A long-shot signing by Reid, he stepped in for Kevin Kolb and, for several weeks during 2010, showed what kind of quarterback he might have been had he been better coached, and been more receptive to coaching, when he was younger. What Vick couldn’t do in 2011 and 2012, however, was either stay healthy or play well enough to allow the Eagles to overcome their Dream Team-driven player-personnel mistakes.

The Eagles had invested so much to acquire Wentz — two trades to jump up to the No. 2 pick in the 2016 draft — and were so convinced that he had the right physical traits and mental makeup to be their franchise QB that they extended his contract at what was, in retrospect, a strange time. They announced his four-year deal, for up to $128 million, in June 2019, less than six months after Nick Foles had filled in for Wentz and rescued them for the second straight season.

» READ MORE: Jalen Hurts is the antidote to Carson Wentz and Ben Simmons

Wentz’s descent, of course, is well-trod territory. The injuries he has suffered, his stubbornness and selfishness, his inability and/or unwillingness to evolve as a quarterback: Those factors didn’t just end his tenure in Philadelphia. They have put his very NFL career at risk.

We’re still in the afterglow stage of Hurts’ time with the Eagles. His outstanding 2022 season, his performance in Super Bowl LVII, and his leadership and character are strong evidence that he and the Eagles can and will dodge some of the problems that arose with his predecessors. It seems unlikely, for instance, that Hurts will be so put off by one of the team’s player-personnel decisions that he’ll demand to be traded, as Wentz was. At the moment, he is still seen as the guy who overcame the odds to develop into arguably the best quarterback in the NFC. (Once the Green Bay Packers trade Aaron Rodgers to the Jets, we can drop the arguably.)

Now that Hurts is the league’s highest-paid player, though, the expectations of him will be different. He will be expected to avoid the kinds of injuries and attrition that McNabb, Vick, and Wentz — mobile quarterbacks all, just like Hurts — couldn’t. He will be expected to win a Super Bowl — a feat that McNabb and Wentz, once thought to be saviors here, couldn’t pull off — even as the Eagles’ spending power under the salary cap will be limited because they signed him. He will be expected to justify those eye-bulging dollar figures now attached to his name: $255 million total, $51 million per year.

Those are the harsh realities of being the Philadelphia Eagles’ franchise quarterback. Those are the risks that Jeffrey Lurie loves to take. Jalen Hurts was a genuinely great story when he was persuading the Eagles that they did not, in fact, have to trade for Russell Wilson or Deshaun Watson. But being a great story lasts only so long and gets you only so far when you’re supposed to be The Man.