A year removed from a Super Bowl MVP, Jalen Hurts is the seventh name on an honorable-mention list; the 70-plus anonymous executives, coaches, and scouts ESPN polled ranked him 17th overall, and only fifteen percent of them bothered to include him in their top ten at all. This isn’t really a referendum on how Hurts is throwing a football. It’s a referendum on how fast a room full of people with something to prove will discard a championship once the games stop looking easy.
Last year, fresh off that MVP trophy, the same survey had him at No. 9. Now Hurts sits at 17, the last name mentioned before the ranking simply stops, and not a single voter who included him ranked him higher than ninth or tenth. The players who leapfrogged him this cycle include Drake Maye, Jared Goff, and Caleb Williams. They’d tell you this is about tape. It is actually about television, and about how recently a guy did something on it that people remember.
On the field, the disappointment is real enough: the Eagles lost in the first round of the playoffs, at home, to the 49ers, 23-19, with Hurts throwing for 168 yards and a single touchdown in the loss. Offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo got fired afterward. Measured against the year before it, the season was a step down, and nobody arguing on Hurts’s behalf is pretending otherwise.
But the rest of the ledger reads better than the ranking implies: a career-high 25 passing touchdowns against six interceptions, 3,224 yards, numbers that get called efficient when a different quarterback throws them. What dragged the number down, per Fowler’s own reporting, is the supporting cast. The Eagles finished 194.3 yards per game through the air, bottom ten in the league, and Fowler notes that “it is hard to have a top 12, even a top 15 QB, with that metric.” Fine. Except that metric is offensive line health and scheme continuity as much as it is Hurts. The front office’s own offseason priorities suggest they know it: the Eagles just made Jalen Carter the highest-paid defensive tackle in football, a contract that says plenty about where the organization’s real anxiety lives, and it isn’t quarterback.
That explanation gets closer to the real mechanism than any stat does. Fowler wrote that the league holds “a great deal of respect” for Hurts, that he “throws a great ball,” and that, in his own words, “this is an exercise in fear. Fear in the NFL is currency.” Take him at his word and the whole survey stops resembling scouting and starts resembling a credit rating agency, one that downgrades a bond the moment its issuer misses a single payment, regardless of the decade of good faith that preceded it. Hurts’s championship is the payment history; the wild-card loss is the missed payment; the 70-some voters are the ratings committee, quietly moving him from investment grade to speculative without ever explaining what changed about the underlying business.
One member of that committee dissented. An anonymous AFC coach told ESPN he was still “betting on the Super Bowl credentials, the intangibles and the toughness,” up-and-down season or not.
That’s one vote.
It was outnumbered by the eighty-five percent of the room that would rather downgrade the bond than sit with the discomfort of explaining why the fundamentals hadn’t actually moved.
The passing game’s problems didn’t happen in a vacuum, either. A.J. Brown had his own run through trade speculation this year, and an offense that finished in the bottom ten in yardage was operating without the continuity a quarterback needs to look good on television, which, by Fowler’s own logic, is the actual metric here.
Fowler posted his own tier breakdown of the voting on X:
https://twitter.com/JFowlerESPN/status/2076649597758320902
He grouped the reigning Super Bowl MVP with Trevor Lawrence — one tier above Nix, Jones, and Stroud, and seven names behind the sport’s actual top ten. That’s the whole argument in a single graphic. The committee isn’t rating quarterbacks. It’s rating recency, and recency has a short memory.
The honorable-mention tier Hurts landed in ran seven names deep: Darnold, Daniels, Love, Purdy, Mayfield, Lawrence, then Hurts. Exactly one of them is a Super Bowl champion. Even after A.J. Brown survived his own trade-deadline speculation and stayed an Eagle, the damage to the passing game’s reputation was already priced in; rankings don’t get revised once the narrative sets. Emmanuel Acho, a former Eagles linebacker himself, called the result “probably the most disrespectful” outcome of the exercise on his podcast, noting Hurts ranked behind quarterbacks, Justin Herbert included, who have never won a playoff game. “Utterly shameful” was the phrase he landed on.
Call it whatever the voters want to call it. It isn’t scouting. A grading system whose only common denominator among its winners is starring in enough exciting football on television gets you a poll, not a ranking, and the version of Hurts who hoisted the Lombardi Trophy in February didn’t get worse at football; he just stopped being recent enough to remember. Run this exercise again closer to February and watch the math change back.
