Jalen Hurts Gets Help

For once, Jalen Hurts had help.

He didn’t have to scoop up the Eagles, put them on his back, and huff and puff to try to get them across the finish line.

The quarterback didn’t have to play Superman.

Not with a running game that piled up 236 yards. Hurts once again led the way on the ground with 71 yards, but his running backs weren’t bystanders.

Boston Scott and Jordan Howard each had two touchdowns in the Eagled’ 44-6 blowout of the Lions. They combined for 117 yards on the ground with each carrying the ball 12 times.

As a team, the Egles ran the ball 46 times.

Hurts had just seven of those runs.

Was it a surprise that it was Scott, who had played just four snaps in the first six games, and Howard, who was seeing his first action of the season after being elevated from the practice squad a day before the game, who did the damage?

Was it a surprise that head coach Nick Sirianni ran the ball that much after insisting Hurts throw the ball an unhealthy amount of times in winning just twice in the first seven games?

Was any of it a surprise at all?

Not to Hurts, it wasn’t.

“Nothing’s really a surprise to me,” he said. “It’s a testament to the hard work that they (Scott and Howard) put in and their patience they’ve had to wait for their opportunity to come at the end of the day. What a job they did of taking advantage of it. They came out, they played well, yards after contact. They did a hell of a job.”

It had to be a surprise to an Eagles fan base who haven't seen a running game this lethal since, well, 40 years?

It was the first time the Eagles have rushed for 200-plus yards and four touchdowns since Dec. 22, 2013, vs. the Chicago Bears, but the last time it happened was in 1980 when Leroy Harris and Wilbert Montgomery each had two TDs as the Eagles ran for 249 yards against Minnesota.

It had to be a surprise to an Eagles fan base used to see Hurts carry the load and then some.

Hurts only threw the ball a season-low 14 times. He simply did not have to, not with the way the Eagles were controlling the line of scrimmage and running the leather off the ball.

“I’m OK with winning,” said Hurts when asked if he’s OK with throwing fewer passes in a game. “I’m OK with winning. I say the same thing every week.”

As for Sirianni, maybe he learned something about this offense, about this team in what they were able to accomplish on the ground the coach credited the offensive line, and it was a line that overcame a hand injury to right guard Jack Driscoll in the first quarter that pressed Nate Herbig into action the rest of the way.

“I think Jalen has big shoulders and I think he’s able to handle a lot, I really do,” said the coach. “Essentially you can say that he’s still in his rookie year as far as starts go. So yeah, that’s going to be able to help him out, and when you’re able to run it like that it’s going to create space from him and the offensive line on the play-action game.

“We’re evolving every week on offense. I think that’s the main thing, is that we’re evolving each week on offense. We’re figuring out more and more what we do well and just evolving. And that’s just the mentality of what we talk about in there is get better every single day. That’s just not a player thing, that’s a coach thing, that’s an everybody thing. If we all live by that and we all get better each day, then good things are going to happen.”

So maybe there will be more runs in the future, especially with the Los Angeles Chargers due to visit Lincoln Financial Field next week.

The Chargers entered the weekend with the worst run defense in the NFL, allowing 5.5 yards per carry.

“We do what we need to do to win football games and what we think is best to win football games,” said Sirianni. “We got some good runs early on and when the offensive line kept coming back to the sidelines saying, ‘Hey we’ve got a lot of momentum right here, we’re pushing them up front.’

“So, we just kept staying with it. I thought Jalen did a good job of checking us in and out of some plays, in and out of some looks. Again, we did what we needed to do to win this football game. It was great to be able to see us run the football like that. We played really physical up front. It always starts right there.”

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Ed Kracz is the publisher of SI.com’s Eagle Maven and co-host of the Eagles Unfiltered Podcast. Check out the latest Eagles news at www.SI.com/NFL/Eagles or www.eaglemaven.com and please follow him on Twitter: @kracze.