By the time that Quinyon Mitchell went looking for a celebratory snowball midway through the third quarter, the morning snowfall had already melted everywhere but the most insulated corners of Lincoln Financial Field.
The Eagles offense was heating up, after all.
An overnight snow shower giving way to a frigid, windy afternoon against the Las Vegas Raiders turned out to be the perfect storm for the Eagles offense in a 31-o victory on Sunday. And at the center of that storm? A bounce-back performance from Jalen Hurts after a week of intense scrutiny stemmed from one of the worst games of his career last Monday against the Los Angeles Chargers.
His five turnovers doomed the Eagles offense at SoFi Stadium and led to a long short week spent discussing Hurts’ culpability for how stuck the offense has been this season and, for some, the question about whether the Super Bowl MVP deserved to get benched in favor of Tanner McKee.
In response, Hurts said he was focused on, well, “the response.”
Six days in the making, Hurts levied a weighty reply.
He authored an efficient, emphatic performance, going 12-for-15 for 175 yards and three touchdowns in the pass game while adding 39 rushing yards on seven noteworthy attempts as well. And while the “response” Hurts alluded to a week prior was the theoretical kind, his reaction to tossing his third touchdown pass on what would be his final play of the game was a telling moment of release for the typically stoic signal caller.
“Just a natural reaction,” Hurts said after the game.
Hurts’ teammates noticed. He knew they would.
“Everybody is watching, that just comes with it,” Hurts said. “And that hasn’t changed. I think everybody needs to remember where I come from and how I’m built. I just want to lead in the right way and set the right example. I’ve done the same thing since I went to the University of Alabama and everything that’s been in front of me. It’s not different now.”
Eagles defensive end Brandon Graham added, “He knows he’s been there before. It doesn’t always feel good when you have to go back to that, but you know you’re built for it. And he’s been built for it. … Like I tell him all the time, ‘We just keep working while they keep talking.'”
Fittingly, Hurts and Co.’s offensive explosion against Las Vegas resulted in him watching McKee and the rest of the Eagles available offensive reserves finish out the fourth quarter from the sideline of the blowout win. According to TruMedia, Sunday was the best game of Hurts’ career in terms of EPA/dropback and ranked fifth out of 85 starts in success rate as well.
Hurts found Dallas Goedert for a pair of red-zone touchdowns from four yards out, the first on a shovel pass and the second on a push pass a few quarters later. His final throw of the game was a 27-yard touchdown strike to A.J. Brown after the receiver found space in the middle of the field on a post route that attacked the front of the end zone.
“He’s resilient,” Sirianni said. “Always has been resilient and thought he was really good running the offense, being in command out there, just making good decisions with the football, good runs. He had a good game.”
Perhaps just as important as Hurts’ response, there were a few key differences from how 27-year-old operated within the scheme to note as well. The Eagles deployed a higher rate of under-center formations, particularly on early downs, and found success running out of those looks in the second half against a Raiders defense that came into the game ranked 19th in defensive DVOA, 22nd in EPA/play and 25th in defensive success rate.
Saquon Barkley had 78 rushing yards, 49 of which came from under center looks, crediting Eagles offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo for staying with the run even after a few stagnant attempts early in the game.
“I’ve got to give credit for KP and those guys for sticking with it,” Barkley said. “We had some negative runs, but I felt like that helped. Even though we had some negative runs, some muddy runs, sticking with it and letting us get rolling, I think it helped the offense today.”
Hurts also had key contributions to the run game. He had five designed runs, including one on the Eagles’ opening drive that went for nine yards on third-and-4. Hurts’ athleticism was also a big part of a handful of run-pass (or run-pass-run) option plays that got him out in space with the choice to either take off or hit a receiver for an underneath completion.
It wasn’t without risk — Hurts got up slowly from an awkward tackle on the play before his final pass to Brown in the end zone — but offered a dynamic seldom seen from the offense this season with Hurts’ running ability more consistently leveraged in the pass game.
“It’s just the flow of how it went,” Hurts said. “Every week is the same in terms of going out and trying to execute what’s called. That’s just how the cookie crumbled today.”
Sirianni added, “He’s dynamic in being able to be a passer, he is dynamic to be able to be a runner. He is a dual-threat quarterback, and we had some good designs there today and he did a great job of reading things and seeing things and getting the yards that he needed to get a couple big third-down conversions. He did a nice job. He did a nice job with that today.”
Sunday’s success aside, it’s fair to wonder if this game will represent a sustainable shift for the Eagles offense after a month of significant struggle or look more like a one-game blip courtesy of a foundering team late in the season. Both Hurts and Sirianni were notably dismissive of the notion that Sunday’s game solved the offensive issues that persisted before it.
“I think it was just a step today,” Hurts said. “We have to treat every game individually and every day individually in pursuit of our best self.”
Still, the hints of an identity certainly validated the notion that the offense is moving in the right direction as the postseason fast approaches.
Soon they’ll be measured by the win-loss column above anything else. For Hurts, that may already be the measuring stick.
“I responded,” he said Sunday. “With a win.”
