Can QB whisperers Josh McCown or Cam Turner salvage Jalen Hurts as the Eagles’ new OC?

The Eagles don’t just need an offensive coordinator. They need a quarterback whisperer.

They need Josh McCown. Or maybe Cam Turner.

Kevin Patullo wasn’t ready for the OC job in Philly, but then, Bill Walsh and Sid Gillman wouldn’t have won a Super Bowl the way Jalen Hurts played in 2025.

Hurts’ development has stalled. He might even be broken. He’s largely the same quarterback at the end of the 2025 season as he was at the end of 2022. Defenses know that, and they exploit it. As the offensive line deteriorated, and as Saquon Barkley and A.J. Brown started to show their age, more was asked of Hurts, who delivered ever less.

» READ MORE: Nick Sirianni had a worse year than Kevin Patullo, Jalen Hurts, A.J. Brown, or anyone on the Eagles

No, the Eagles don’t just need a play-caller.

They need an offensive coordinator who can invigorate a veteran quarterback whose career is idling. Both McCown, a former Eagles backup quarterback, and Turner, who has the bluest of NFL bloodlines, have done just that.

The most compelling story of the 2024 season involved Sam Darnold, the No. 3 overall pick in 2018 and a bust with the Jets, Panthers, and 49ers, making the Pro Bowl in his seventh season as he led the Vikings to a 14-3 record.

McCown was Darnold’s quarterbacks coach.

The most compelling story early in the 2025 season involved not only Darnold’s continued ascendance, now in Seattle, but also Daniel Jones. He was the No. 6 overall pick in 2019 but turned out to be such a bust with the Giants in his first six seasons that they released him.

Jones signed with Indianapolis, where Turner, as quarterbacks coach, had been developing Anthony Richardson, the No. 4 overall pick in 2023, while helping veterans Joe Flacco and Gardner Minshew squeeze out a few more NFL starts. When given an established talent like Jones, though, Turner made hay. Turner convinced head coach Shane Steichen to bench Richardson in favor of Jones, and Turner was right. The Colts were 8-2 and Jones was a dark-horse MVP candidate with a career-high 101.6 passer rating when he broke his leg in Game 11. Jones suffered a torn Achilles tendon two games later.

So, amid all the flashy possible candidates — fired Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel, fired Giants head coach Brian Daboll, fired Commanders coordinator Kliff Kingsbury, figurehead 49ers OC Klay Kubiak — you have, in McCown and Turner, two position coaches who played the position, who possess credible pedigrees, and, within the past two years, have salvaged the careers of quarterbacks who were in even worse shape than Hurts.

Granted, they wouldn’t be acting as Hurts’ position coach. However, if head coach Nick Sirianni — also never a QB, and only briefly a QB coach — will assume more of a role in scheme construction and game-planning, McCown or Turner could spend more time with Hurts than would a normal OC.

Granted, they haven’t called plays. But then, neither had Ben Johnson when he became offensive coordinator in Detroit in 2022. He’d never even coached quarterbacks. He still turned out to be excellent at running an offense, both with the Lions through 2024, as well as in 2025, his first season as head coach with the Bears, who are two wins from the Super Bowl.

The team desperately needs some QB IQ in the building after the caliber of coaching Hurts received this season. And no, we’re not referring to Patullo.

There was a lot of head-scratching last winter when Sirianni hired career college coach Scot Loeffler as quarterbacks coach. Loeffler’s only season in the NFL was as quarterbacks coach for the Lions in 2008, when Daunte Culpepper, Jon Kitna, and current ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky combined for an 0-16 record. Loeffler coached on the first 0-16 team in NFL history, a season best remembered for Orlovsky, while facing modest pressure, unwittingly scrambling out of the back of the end zone (the Lions lost by two points).

Unlike Loeffler, McCown and Turner bring significant NFL bona fides.

McCown played for 10 NFL teams over a 16-year career. He only approached being a full-time starter four times, but at his last eight stops he was credited with making the other quarterbacks better as a sort of extra coach. In 2006, with the Lions, he actually played wide receiver, and caught both passes thrown to him. In 2019, he came out of retirement and served as Carson Wentz’s backup and mentor. Not coincidentally, Wentz’s career cratered after 2020.

Even if he doesn’t get the OC job, McCown always will have a home in Philly. Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie loves him. He offered McCown a coaching job after the 2019 season, which McCown, then 40, declined, hoping to take one more shot as a player. Lurie then signed McCown to the practice squad in 2020 but still let McCown live at home in Texas until the Texans signed McCown onto their active roster in November.

» READ MORE: Who will be the Eagles’ next offensive coordinator? Start with these eight names.

Other than recently redeeming failed quarterbacks, McCown and Turner share little else in their backgrounds.

Depending on how you view things, either Turner is one of the NFL‘s most egregious proliferate examples of nepotism or he has impeccable NFL coaching DNA.

His uncle, Norv Turner, won two Super Bowls in the early 1990s as Jimmy Johnson’s offensive coordinator in Dallas. His cousin and Norv’s son, Scott Turner, has spent 17 seasons coaching in the NFL, and he’s the Jets’ passing game coordinator now, but that shouldn’t count against Cam.

Independent of his connections, Cam has proved himself worthy of his appointments. He was the assistant QB coach in Arizona in 2021, when Kyler Murray went to his first Pro Bowl, and was the head QB coach in 2022, when Murray went to his second.

Turner also has the benefit of working with Steichen in Indy. Steichen, of course, was the OC when the Eagles made it to the Super Bowl after the 2022 season.

Turner also worked in Arizona under Kingsbury, one of the retread candidates everyone has been sniffing around since Black Monday began claiming victims last week.

“Sniffing around.”

Sounds about right.

With a $128 million offense like the Eagles’, why risk a season on lesser-known candidates like McCown and Turner?

Because being lesser-known doesn’t necessarily equate to lesser ability.

Mike McDaniel is a big name, but the awkward departure of Vic Fangio as his defensive coordinator after their 2023 season together would cause instant friction if McDaniel joined a franchise and moved to a city where Fangio is worshipped. Anyway, McDaniel seems certain to get another head coaching gig during this hiring cycle. If he doesn’t, he’d be foolish to turn down the Lions OC job if offered, since, in this moment, Jared Goff is a better quarterback than Hurts.

There isn’t a universe in which Ravens offensive coordinator Todd Monken doesn’t accompany John Harbaugh to Harbaugh’s next stop, since Harbaugh’s refusal to fire Monken apparently influenced his firing in Baltimore.

» READ MORE: Murphy: After embarrassing Kevin Patullo pile-on, Eagles must make Mike McDaniel their main OC target

Doug Nussmeier got fired by the Cowboys as QB coach after 2022, failed as Kellen Moore’s QB coach with the Chargers in 2023, then was the QB coach in Philly during Hurts’ mediocre 2024 season. Not exactly a sterling resumé.

Frank Reich, the OC in 2016-17 under Doug Pederson, is Lurie’s favorite employee ever, and, at 64, he’s unlikely to be poached by any other team if the Eagles thrive with him as coordinator. But Reich was less responsible for Wentz’s development than hard-nosed quarterbacks coach John DeFilippo. As for “Flip” himself, team sources have said in the past that DeFilippo long ago burned any bridge that might ever bring him back to Philadelphia, and there have been plenty of opportunities to do so.

Rams passing game coordinator Nate Scheelhaase has never coached NFL quarterbacks, has one year as a college offensive coordinator, and with all due respect, seems to be this year’s long-shot assistant who gets the Duce Staley Treatment — that is, token interviews for head-coaching jobs with NFL teams trying to fulfill Rooney Rule requirements.

Still, Scheelhaase seems far more qualified than Klay Kubiak. He spent seven of his first eight years out of college coaching high school, and only three of those as a head coach. He joined the Niners in 2021, and he has been offensive coordinator for just one year, but he doesn’t even call plays. Kyle Shanahan does.

To be fair, considering all the podcast pundits and online experts, game planning, sequencing, adjusting, and play-calling can’t be all that hard.