Unlocking Jalen Hurts' Ability Continues to Escape Eagles' Coaching Staff

The Eagles coaching staff can’t seem to figure out what to do with Jalen Hurts, even while opposing defenses have.

All defenses have done is stack the box knowing the Eagles will have Hurts either run or handoff. He’s thrown the ball twice in 30 snaps and completed both passes. Those throwing plays have been the outlier, though.

Stack the box and look for the run. The Eagles have made it that simple.

The proactive approach would have been to adjust the use of Hurts before a defense did and the Eagles had plenty of time to do that having played only one game in 24 days before losing to the Giants on Sunday.

Except nothing changed.

Hurts played three snaps against New York. He ran twice and lost one yard in those carries.

“I think early on (in the season), we've been very explosive with him,” said head coach Doug Pederson on Monday. “Gosh, I think we were close to 11 or 12 yards per attempt when he was in the game, something like that. I would say here recently, defenses are playing him a little bit differently. They have had chances to scout him.”

That was to be expected. So, too, was an adjustment from Pederson and his staff. Find different uses for him.

A novel idea was thrown at Pederson on Monday about maybe taking Carson Wentz off the field completely when Hurts comes on, rather than line up Wentz as a receiver that everybody knows isn’t getting thrown to.

It is as the reporter pointed out what the New Orleans Saints do when they put Taysom Hill in for Drew Brees. Head coach Sean Payton removes Brees from the game completely.

“Sure,” said Pederson. “Yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea.”

The follow up was, why haven’t you done that?

“It's a great idea,” said the coach. “Something we'll look into.”

The coach was being snarky, at least one would hope so, though, to be honest, it wasn’t that easy to tell.

Pederson’s press conferences sometimes tend to veer into the bizarre, maybe more so this season.

Last week, it was the three questions he needed to be asked to distance himself from his friend Brett Favre’s remarks regarding the Hall of Fame QB's opinion about keeping Nick Foles over Carson Wentz.

Earlier, it was his comments about sitting down Jordan Mailata in order to help him learn how to play a better tackle position by watching, something he compared to sitting Nelson Agholor down in the 2016 season, even though the two situations had nothing to with each other.

Now, the Hurts stuff.

Pederson is mostly right about Hurts being effective early.

He averaged four yards on two carries in his pro debut against the Bengals in Week 3 that went up to six yards on three runs against the 49ers. After not running the ball the next week but throwing it for an 18-yard gain against the Steelers, Hurts averaged 11.5 yards per carry on two attempts against the Ravens.

Since then, he has been relatively ineffective and rarely used.

“We could probably do a little bit more with him,” said Pederson.

There have been some fumbling issues, but Pederson said those are a result of bad snaps from Jason Kelce.

“I've talked to Kelce about this before, and he's had a little history and he knows it, and listen, he's a pro and he's going to get it fixed, but we have to get that center quarterback exchange dialed in and a couple of those were low and those are hard to handle,” said Pederson. “So I wouldn't put them all on Jalen, no.”

In the grand scheme of things, there are bigger issues going on than what to do with Hurts, but making him more of a threat, turning him into a spark, can only help.

As for Hurts’ thoughts, nobody knows. The Eagles haven’t made him available for an interview since the end of July.

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