The power of Jeffrey Lurie’s love for Jalen Hurts is a curious thing. Will it make the Eagles weep or sing?
There's a pattern that has developed over Lurie's tenure: He gives the quarterback leverage over the head coach. It's happening again, and as usual, it's complicating everything.
Jeffrey Lurie loves Jalen Hurts. He loves Jalen Hurts in much the same way that he loved Carson Wentz … until Carson Wentz stopped loving the Eagles. He loves Jalen Hurts in much the same way that he loved Nick Foles .. and probably still loves Nick Foles. He loves Jalen Hurts in much the same way that he loved Michael Vick … until Vick’s body began to break down, which didn’t allow Vick to love football as much or play it as well as he once did. He loves Jalen Hurts in much the same way that he loved Donovan McNabb, though in those days, Jeffrey Lurie might have loved Andy Reid even more.
That historical context — Lurie’s affection for the men who have played the most important position in football for him — goes a long way to explaining the swirl of questions around Hurts this offseason and, really, throughout his Eagles career.
If there seems to be an excess of controversy around a quarterback and a franchise that have won a Super Bowl, reached another, and qualified for the playoffs each of the last five seasons, there might be a couple of reasons.
One is that the Eagles are covered locally unlike any other team in the NFL. Philadelphia is the biggest U.S. market where its NFL franchise is by far its most popular sports franchise, and that attention — and the quality of the reporters covering the Eagles — leads to detailed stories like the ones about Hurts that appeared recently in The Inquirer and on ESPN.
But another source of the cloud of scuttlebutt around Hurts is Lurie himself. He and the Eagles have established a pattern of pursuing or settling on a franchise quarterback, pledging love and loyalty to that franchise quarterback, and then moving on to another quarterback. This pattern ended up undercutting the success that the Eagles had after drafting Wentz in 2016, and it threatens to do the same now that Hurts is entering his sixth season as their starter.
“I love Jalen,” Lurie told reporters Tuesday at the NFL’s owners meetings. “There’s no bigger fan of Jalen than me: clutch gene absolutely, MVP of the Super Bowl 13 months ago, should have been MVP of the Super Bowl right before that against Kansas City the first time, exceptional and so dedicated. I … spend a lot of time with Jalen, as I do most quarterbacks, and [he’s] incredibly dedicated to the game, to winning, and being a huge winner, and I love everything about him.”
Lots of NFL owners have had close relationships with their franchise quarterbacks over the years. In that regard, the Lurie-Hurts dynamic is no different from, say, the one between Robert Kraft and Tom Brady in New England or between John Mara and Eli Manning with the Giants. But it is different in one significant way: The Eagles don’t invest their head coach with the same power that the Patriots did with Bill Belichick, the Giants did with Tom Coughlin, or that other teams do with their head coaches.
Reid earned and accumulated that control and discretion over his 14 years with the organization. “Andy really started it all,” Lurie said in February 2025. But it has been 11 years since Lurie gave Chip Kelly carte blanche to build a roster as he saw fit — a “test” (as Lurie liked to call it) that Kelly failed. The Eagles went 7-9 in 2015, and after firing Kelly before that season’s final game, Lurie hasn’t followed that same formula since. Instead, he made the Eagles a general manager-first organization, reinstating Howie Roseman and elevating Roseman into his primary strategic partner.
That approach has, generally speaking, worked wonderfully. Two years after the Kelly debacle, the Eagles won their first Super Bowl. That 2017-18 season was the start of a nine-year stretch in which they have won two league championships, three conference championships, and five division championships; made the playoffs eight times; and finished with a losing record just once. And that track record is even more impressive when you consider that they won those Super Bowls with different head coaches (Doug Pederson and Nick Sirianni) and different quarterbacks (Foles/Wentz and Hurts).
But …
Everyone knows what the Eagles’ true power hierarchy looks like. First, there’s Lurie. Then comes Roseman. Then — and here’s the part people need to understand, the part that’s relevant to this current controversy — comes the quarterback. Then comes the head coach. It was that way with Wentz and Pederson, and it’s that way now with Hurts and Sirianni.
Remember: The Eagles bent over backwards to accommodate Wentz. During his MVP-caliber 2017 season, he bristled at QB coach John DeFilippo’s hard and exacting tutelage, so the Eagles took care to make sure he never experienced anything like it again. DeFilippo left, and a coach with the same kind of jagged edges never replaced him. The franchise let Foles walk away and went all in on Wentz. And even when Wentz short-circuited after the Eagles drafted Hurts and went 4-11-1 in 2020, Lurie and Roseman still fired Pederson before resigning themselves to trading Wentz.
So how different is the Hurts situation now? It doesn’t seem coincidental that Sirianni praises Hurts almost as much as Lurie does. The surest way for him to keep his job is to win games and stay in the good graces of the owner and the quarterback. That reality has led to a delicate dance in which Sirianni has praised Hurts to the high heavens while, at the same time, often deemphasizing Hurts’ role in the offense for the sake of trying to scratch out victories by relying on the Eagles’ defense and running game.
It’s clear now that the Eagles can’t and don’t want to keep living that way, and it’s also clear that Hurts will require some tough coaching himself if he hopes to continue improving and thriving. He needs to master operating from under center. He needs to become comfortable turning his back to a defense in play-action sets. He needs to give a little to grow his game. But if he remains stubborn about adjusting his style of play or adapting to new systems and schemes — and as has now been laid bare, he has been stubborn about it — what exactly is Sirianni or Sean Mannion (or Kevin Patullo before him) supposed to do about it?
Who in the locker room is going to tell Hurts that he isn’t Michael Jordan, that he isn’t Kobe Bryant, that mimicking their standoffish leadership styles doesn’t work for him because he isn’t one of his sport’s immortals? If any of those coaches or players gets into a power struggle with Hurts, who do you think is going to win?
Jeffrey Lurie just told you. The only thing that will change his mind is another season of steps backward. And if that happens, Jalen Hurts won’t be his only breakup, just his most painful.