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PHILADELPHIA — The Eagles did the usual on Tuesday, cutting a roster to 53 by releasing no one who ever figured to matter.
They also remained solid with the one player who will.
Not that it doesn’t take a team to succeed or that they Eagles haven’t assembled a nice collection of talented players at various stages of their professional lives, but there wasn’t a single name on that (close to) final duty sheet that will help win a championship if the No. 1 option fails.
So what if Jalen Hurts is not a player who deserved to win the priciest contract in the history of the sport?
What if he is great, just not sport-redefining? What if he is good, but not great? What if he slumps? What if he is banged up? What if opposing defensive coordinators, who have had Hurts video to analyze for months, pick up a tell? What if the offensive line begins to show its age and the protection is reduced by a hair to compromise Hurts’ dominance?
What if?
Given recent history, which included the best single season an Eagles quarterback had ever unloaded, those remain unnecessary to consider. It’s really a strain of fear-mongering, inventing a crisis that doesn’t exist.
Still, no topic in the hours before a regular season should ever become so taboo that it isn’t even permitted in friendly conversation. Yet around NewsControl Nation, there is rarely (ever?) a muttered or written syllable questioning the one player who will either make the Eagles’ season or shove it into the shredder. Tanner McKee has received twice the publicity.
There is nothing Hurts has done since coming one full possession away from a chance to drive the Eagles to a world championship that would hint at a pending career step-back. At the press conference to celebrate his five-year, $255,000,000 contract, he not only said every right thing but chased it all with what should be a career-defining quotation: Money is nice, championships are better. Nailed it, he did.
From there, according to the spies, he did everything else right too, mostly in the quarterback room, but also among the rest of his teammates, projecting a confidence and an ability to lead that cannot be manufactured. Donovan McNabb, for instance, used to try to project that, appointing himself the “captain of the ship” among other flimsy boasts, but that was before too many reported cases of in-game stomach distress lifted that cover.
Finally, according to the data leaking from training camp, he completed a bunch of passes against defenses not allowed to knock him down.
So as Hurts enters his fourth season, his third as the full-time quarterback, he does so without a stain on his professional record, not even from the trainers’ room, where he has had to visit on occasion but never for long.
The Eagles, though, have had a small sampling of quarterbacks who seemed perfect only until they didn’t. Anyone remember Bobby Hoying? OK, that was during the Ice Age. And Hurts is already proven, having guided the Eagles to a Super Bowl and being the best player in the NFC. However, there seems to be a more recent example of a player who had a phenomenal early-career season and was hugely involved in generating a (winning) Super Bowl run who, as it happened, trended hideous soon after and who can’t even find NFL employment six years later. That is relevant, contemporary history.
The Eagles threw draft picks, money and more money at Carson Wentz, covered him with a publicity iron curtain, and eventually realized that they could take a quarterback out of North Dakota State but couldn’t take the mid-major out of the quarterback. Indeed, Wentz became the first player in the modern history of the bloody sport declared rotten, not good, in the quarterback room.
So there?
“I don’t want to get in the comparison game because I don’t think that’s fair,” Howie Roseman said upon extending Hurts. “What I would say in terms of Jalen — the one thing you know about with Jalen, is that the money is not going to change him. The money is not going to affect him.
“My first conversation with him after he signed that contract, he was just telling me how determined he was, and I know how hard he’s working in the offseason. I know how much football matters to him. I know how much improving at football matters to him. I know how much he wants to be coached. I know how important it is to try to deliver a championship to this city.
“I don’t have any doubt in my mind that giving Jalen this contract will not change the person that Jalen is. No doubt.”
By Tuesday, the Eagles were down to 53 players, 52 who can help, one who must. And Roseman, who usually is, is probably right again.
Probably.
Contact Jack McCaffery at jmccaffery@delcotimes.com
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