Jalen Hurts navigated summer without an interception until Day 16 of training camp, the final day when Darius Slay swiped one.
It was a good story while it lasted, and the thought was, well, the Eagles quarterback may have flipped the script from last year, when he threw 17 picks and lost three fumbles, that he somehow was able to devour an offense that was 95 percent new to him in a matter of months.
He was sharp, crisp, efficient. He made good decisions.
Then came the season opener and he was none of those things, and we quickly remembered that wearing a red pinnie in practice doesn’t help when the real games start.
To Hurts’ credit, he overcame two interceptions and a fumble, which was really the fault of center Cam Jurgens who snapped the ball prematurely, to lead the Eagles to a 34-29 win over the Green Bay Packers in Sau Paolo, Brazil, on Friday night.
The quarterback trhew a pair of touchdowns, incuding a beautifully-thrown pass to Saqon Barkley from 18 yards away into a tight pocket just inside the end zone. Hurts finished 20-for-34 with 278 yards and a respectable 80.3 passer rating.
The Eagles are 1-0. They survived, but it’s not often a team that turns the ball over three times and gets only back from the defense wins games.
Head coach Nick Sirianni called a win like that “an anomaly,” because teams that lose the turnover battle, like Philly did, 3-1, lose a lot more than they win.
It isn't like the blitz gave the quarterback trouble, either. He was 6-for-8 against it for 91 yards and a touchdown. It's when he had time to process that gave him trouble on his two picks.
Hurts had to rely on his defense to bail out the mistakes he made on Friday. The defense held the Packers to just three field goals after the three turnovers, which was no easy feat considering they set up shop on the Eagles 13 and 19 after the first pick and the fumble.
“They showed up and had my back big-time in that moment after those two turnovers,” he said. “Those are things that I control, and I have to be better at and I take accountability for that. But that's what it's about. You have moments where it's like, Oh, well, we missed this opportunity, we didn't take advantage of this opportunity, but how do we respond from it?”
After throwing an end zone interception with 13 minutes to play in the game, costing the Eagles a golden opportunity to add to their 31-26 lead and steal hope of a victory from the Packers, Hurts did respond.
The Packers cut the lead to 31-29 with 7:52 to play, then didn’t get the ball back until 27 seconds remained and trailed 34-29 because Hurts engineered a drive that went 67 yards in 16 plays and consumed 7:25 of clock before stalling at the 1, where Jake Elliott booted a 21-yard field goal.
His legs bottled up most of the night, Hurts kept the drive alive with two nice runs covering eight and six yards each, showing a determination not to be tackled and knocking defenders over rather than sliding.
He threw a pair of strikes to DeVonta Smith – and give Kellen Moore some credit here for not just running the ball to drain the clock to kick a field goal – for 16 yards on second-and-13 from the GB 35 with 2:23 to play and again for 11 yards on second-and-eight at the Packers’ 17 with 2:10 left.
It is troubling that Hurts nearly threw a pick-six on the drive and fumbled a tush-push snap at the 1 that Barkley had to fall on.
It’s also troubling to think that the quarterback has a turnover problem, and if he doesn’t solve it, the Eagles won’t do much of anything this season, and make no mistake, Hurts has a turnover problem.
He threw five interceptions in the last four games last year and seven in the last eight and had 20 turnovers in 17 games. The end of the season was a trainwreck with losses in six of the final seven games. The Eagles were -10 in turnover-to-takeaway ratio last year, which was sixth-worst in the league.
He now has 23 turnovers - 17 interceptions and six fumbles - in his last 18 games. He played just three games last season where he did not have a turnover.
If he can’t figure out how to correct it, the Eagles will not only have another season end short of the Super Bowl, despite their talented roster, but they will also have a quarterback problem on their hands just two years after giving him a $255 million contract extension.
The guess is he will figure it out. One game on a bad field in the Southern Hemisphere doesn’t stem that belief, especially seeing every practice this summer. He can do it.
