The Price Of Continuity For Eagles QB Jalen Hurts Is Halting The Hypocrisy

Sometimes when you say something enough it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Take Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts and the “upheaval” in his career dating back to college.

You know the list by now. As a true freshman at Alabama in 2016, the Crimson Tide’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach was Lane Kiffin.

Kiffin, now the head coach at Ole Miss, didn’t even last that season at Alabama before being named the top man at Florida Atlantic. By the BCS National Championship Game against Clemson after that season, Steve Sarkisian had replaced Kiffin.

Sarkisian, currently the top dog at Texas, left for the NFL after the Natty to become the Atlanta Falcons offensive coordinator under Dan Quinn. His replacement was current New York Giants head coach Brian Daboll, who left Tuscaloosa to become Sean McDermott’s OC with the Buffalo Bills.

Succeeding Dabolll for Nick Saban was Mike Locksley, the current Maryland head coach. 

After the 2018 season, Hurts transferred to Oklahoma to work with Lincoln Riley (now the head coach at USC) for the QB’s final collegiate season when he was the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy.

The pros were up next when the Eagles drafted Hurts in the second round in what turned out to be Doug Pederson’s final season with a tortured setup with no actual OC. Press Taylor was the passing game coordinator/quarterbacks coach and Rich Scangarello was the senior offensive assistant, all because Mike Groh was sacrificed for the prior season’s deficiencies.

Pederson was out after the season, partially because he stood his ground on wanting to elevate Taylor to OC, which started the Sirianni regime.

And the easy narrative there is that Hurts had his best season with the continuity of Sirianni and Steichen in Year 2 before Steichen left to become the head coach in Indy after the 2022 Super Bowl season.

Then you had the one disappointing year with Sirianni and Brian Johnson before the former stepped back this season to hand the game-planning and play-calling over to Kellen Moore, in what is Moore’s third stop in three seasons.

Feel free to take a breath now and while you do realize the current jobs were noted to highlight just how consistent the turnover in the coaching industry is.

The last time the Eagles have had an OC for more than three seasons was Pat Shurmur in the Chip Kelly era when Kelly was the one actually running things.

In the current – let’s call it the entitlement era – where this organization typically seems to believe it’s better than it is, the OCs have been Frank Reich in 2016-17, who was hired to be the head coach of the Colts after the Super Bowl LII win, Mike Groh in 2018-19, who Pederson wanted to keep but was forced to move in from, the de facto Taylor/Scangarello nonsense in 2020, Steichen in 2021-22 before the Colts hit the double-down button with Eagles’ OCs, the one-and-done Johnson and now Moore.

GM Howie Roseman addressed all of this back in the summer.

 "The hardest point about continuity in the NFL from a front office or a coaching staff is that, you win, you lose people. You lose, you lose people," Roseman correctly explained.

When the Eagles won they lost their people and when they didn’t live up to expectations it was Jeffrey Lurie leading the charge toward change at the cost of continuity while Pederson desperately tried to cling to it or Sirianni got political before being ordered to forget it.

Moving forward, if the Eagles make a significant run this year there is a good chance Moore will be a head coach somewhere in the league by February 2025 and if Philadelphia falters, Sirianni is likely out and that will trickle down to most of the assistants,

Those who continue to complain about a lack of continuity for Hurts need to keep that same energy when they are calling for the heads of assistants like Groh, Johnson or the current head coach.

Continuity comes with the elimination of hypocrisy and the price of patience.

"It's really hard to keep a lot of good people in place for a long period of time. This isn't about Jalen, just in general. It's just probably a little different than other industries," Roseman said.