NFL executives, coaches, and scouts alike have all given their opinions on who the top quarterbacks in the National Football League are today, and suffice to say, the official rankings have been unkind to Jalen Hurts.
Despite being the starting signal caller for the defending Super Bowl champions, Hurts barely made the list as the ninth-best QB in the league.
“I can’t make sense of it,” Emmanuel Acho exclaimed during the most recent episode of Fox Sport’s The Facility.
His co-host and former Super Bowl champion, James Jones, couldn’t help but agree. “That’s awful.”
“You can think whatever you want to think about Jalen Hurts, but there should never be a list where Justin Herbert is in front of Jalen Hurts… Jayden Daniels is going to be a superstar in this league, I truly believe that, but I cannot put him in front of Jalen Hurts who has two Super Bowls. He’s had one good year… I think this is disrespectful to Jalen Hurts.”
According to their guest analyst and former journeyman quarterback, Chase Daniel, Hurts is likely more deserving of a higher ranking, yet it isn’t wildly outlandish to rank him this low. ”
I think he should be closer to the six-seven spot, personally,” Daniel explained before ultimately suggesting that the other quarterbacks on the list are “more physically talented than him” when it comes to throwing the football.
In the eyes of Daniel, Hurts is what you would call a “new age quarterback,” one who is “willing his team to win.” Nevertheless, executives and bigwigs tend to favor arm talent over everything else, and that inherent bias is preventing Hurts from receiving his due recognition.
“He only threw for 2,900 yards in a whole season, he only threw for 18 touchdowns. A lot of these people in the league, they feel like they are ranking a quarterback based on old school metrics… They’ve been to two Super Bowls, they took a three-peat away from the Kansas City Chiefs…”
As Daniel also alluded to, the vast majority of Hurts’ rushing touchdowns from the 2024 season came via the controversial ‘tush-push,’ which has now seemingly made the signal caller himself an inherently polarizing figure. Throw in the fact that the Philadelphia Eagles currently feature one of, if not the most well-rounded, rosters in all of football today, and it certainly seems plausible that Hurts may not be as talented as his records suggest.
Despite those talking points, however, the Alabama product is still coming off of one of the most dominant Super Bowl victories of the modern era. And given the franchise’s propensity for retaining talent, critics would be well advised to avoid painting the defending champions into the role of the underdog yet again.
