Who is Jalen Hurts?

We've seen the headlines by now: "ESPN experts rank Jalen Hurts 17th"; "Hurts falls again in annual QB Tiers rankings", so forth and so on. The league's thinking on Jalen seems to have settled on an almost insulting "middle of the road, probably not even average" consensus that I just don't understand and will unpack.

First off, just how is Jalen viewed? There have been three major consensus rankings that I've looked at this summer (the now-famous ESPN ranking of journalists, The Athletic's QB Tiers column, done by polling coaches and executives, and a ranking put together by Lindy's magazine with opinions from NFL historians.). Collectively these polls sampled over 120 figures associated with the league, and should represent pretty well how the NFL views these quarterbacks. I took the top 20 from each and assigned points based on where the player was ranked (20 for the top spot, 19 for second and so on). Here's how that turned out:

PLAYER	ESPN	QB TIERS	LINDY	PTS
Josh Allen	1	2.5	1	58.5
Patrick Mahomes	2	1	3	57
Matthew Stafford	3	2.5	2	55.5
Joe Burrow	4	4	4	51
Lamar Jackson	5	5	5	48
Dak Prescott	6	7	6	44
Justin Herbert	7	6	7	43
Drake Maye	8	8.5	8	38.5
Jared Goff	9	8.5	9	36.5
Caleb Williams	10	11.5	11.5	30
Sam Darnold	11	14.5	10	27.5
Jordan Love	13	10	15	25
Brock Purdy	14	11.5	13	24.5
Jayden Daniels	12	13	16	22
Jalen Hurts	17	17	11.5	17.5
Trevor Lawrence	16	16	14	17
Baker Mayfield	15	14.5	17	16.5
Bo Nix	18	18	18	9
CJ Stroud	20	20	19	4
Daniel Jones	19		20	3
Aaron Rodgers		19		2

On balance, Jalen slots at 15th overall by this methodology, which is perfectly mediocre. In my annual QB rankings column, I've personally slotted Hurts at 11th, 3rd, 6th and 5th over the last four preseasons and my guess is that he'll come back in that 6-10 range again this year (stay tuned). Which assessment is more fair? Let's find out...

Before we do, let's consider another quarterback who enjoys nearly universal admiration and adulation; Tom Brady. Most fans simply don't dispute the GOAT narrative surround Brady, and that's largely fine by me. I do invite you to consider a thought experiment with me, built on the following question: can you make Tom Brady's GOAT case without considering anything that happened in the postseason, any team accomplishments (in other words, removing team wins as a QB statistic), and without considering Brady's longevity? If those become the parameters, the "Brady = GOAT" case becomes really difficult. Depending on your individual QB stat of choice, you'd likely conclude that Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, Otto Graham, Joe Burrow or even Lamar Jackson were all better than Brady, and perhaps significantly. This holds true if you prefer passer rating, ANY/A, yards per game, completion percentage, etc. In fact, Brady doesn't show up in the top 5 of most of these rankings. Even if we admit Brady's longevity back into the equation, you'd likely have to conclude that players like Fran Tarkenton and Brett Favre (who enjoyed remarkably long careers in considerably more physical eras) achieved more in this particular area.

Now, I imagine that we all recognize that this is a flawed or at best incomplete look at the question, and the reason that we do is because we do recognize that wins matter at least a bit and that postseason achievements matter more. The fact that we regard Brady as the GOAT is proof of this, and it's with that thought in mind that we need to proceed. Let's walk through the talking points and get to the truth.

The fact that the league thinks so little of Hurts is damning! Actually, the NFL generally does a terrible job evaluating QBs and with a few exceptions seems to get it right mostly by luck. Toss that fact together with the regular and predictable dose of recency bias and these rankings are largely nonsense. No, Josh Allen is not the best QB in the NFL. No, Jordan Love is not a better QB than Hurts. For that matter, neither is Caleb Williams, at least based on what we've seen so far. Don't get me started on Sam Darnold, who's career has been 100% dictated by the quality of the teams he's been on (the same can be said for Stafford, who is also ridiculously overrated by the league, but we'll come back to him in the rankings column). Most of the players ranked above Jalen (certainly those ranked in that 6-14 band) haven't accomplished what he has, let alone more. We'll deal with this in more detail as we go.

Jalen Hurts really isn't a good passer! Hurts will almost certainly never lead the NFL in passing yardage and has never ranked particularly high there (his finish at 10th overall in 2022 is his career high). This is largely due to how Philly uses Hurts and the personnel they've had. I suppose this take depends greatly on what is meant by "good passer"; as we've discussed before, passing volume isn't particularly relevant or valuable but passing efficiency is. If you look at currently active QBs who have started at least 8 games over the past five seasons (a list of 63 players), Jalen "only" ranks 16th in traditional passer rating but 13th in ANY/A and interception rate. He's 12th in yards per attempt. None of this is particularly exciting but I find it interesting that Jalen is at least better than 17th in all of these measures. By the way, if you remove players that haven't played all five seasons or that won't be starting in 2026, Jalen will climb at least 3-4 slots in each of those categories.

Now, saying that Hurts is "probably top 15" in efficiency is tepid praise, but I'd like to look at a few more nuanced and thorough measures of a player's impact. Most notably, nothing mentioned above factors in a QB's running impact. To go deeper, I looked at three data driven measures of overall performance: PFF's scoring system, ESPN's Total QBR and a measure of my own called Total Yards per Play (TYP). Because of the difficulty of pulling some of this data together, I limited the analysis to just QBs expected to start in 2026, but that limitation won't change Jalen's standing in a meaningful way. Here's how that played out:

Player	TYP	QBR	PFF	Avg
Josh Allen	2	1	2	1.67
Brock Purdy	1	2	5	2.67
Patrick Mahomes	4	3	7	4.67
Lamar Jackson	3	7	6	5.33
Joe Burrow	6	10	1	5.67
Jordan Love	7	5	8	6.67
Drake Maye	8	4	10	7.33
Justin Herbert	11	9	3	7.67
Matthew Stafford	9	6	11	8.67
Dak Prescott	12	8	9	9.67
Jayden Daniels	15	11	4	10.00
Jalen Hurts	10	12	12	11.33
Jared Goff	5	13	18	12.00
Kirk Cousins	17	21	13	17.00
C.J. Stroud	18	18	15	17.00
Kyler Murray	21	14	17	17.33
Aaron Rodgers	14	25	14	17.67
Tua Tagovailoa	16	16	21	17.67
Bo Nix	20	17	19	18.67
Trevor Lawrence	23	22	20	21.67
Geno Smith	26	23	16	21.67
Sam Darnold	19	24	24	22.33
Baker Mayfield	24	19	27	23.33
Jaxson Dart	28	15	28	23.67
Malik Willis	13	29	30	24.00
Tyler Shough	22	28	22	24.00
Daniel Jones	27	20	25	24.00
Caleb Williams	25	26	26	25.67
Jacoby Brissett	29	27	23	26.33
Bryce Young	30	30	29	29.67
Cam Ward	31	31	31	31.00
Shedeur Sanders	32	32	32	32.00

Now we see that Hurts has crept up to 12th overall, and is one of just 11 players to finish 12th or better in each metric. Still not elite but we're noticeably better than "17th best QB" now, and we aren't done.

Even your advanced data proves Hurts isn't a top ten QB! Remember back to what we said about Brady; counting stats don't tell the full story of a quarterback's greatness. I generally don't like the "wins are a QB stat" narrative, but (a) I'm apparently the only one that feels this way and (b) I will certainly admit that the QB has his hands on team success more than any other single member of the team.

Because we're allowed to heavily consider team success in our evaluation, let's talk about Jalen from that perspective:

• In his career, Hurts is 26-15 (63.4%) against teams that finished with a winning record (regular season only; we'll talk playoffs soon).

• He is 21-15 (58.3%) against eventual playoff teams (again, regular season).

• Hurts is 13-7 (65%) in games against top eight defenses (by DSRS).

• Hurts' six career playoff wins are 7th among active QBs. If you remove players that are active but won't start this year, he climbs to 5th. His playoff W/L% of 60% is 9th among active players, 7th among active starters and 5th among active starters with more than one playoff appearance. In playoff wins per season ("season" defined here as 16 regular season starts), Jalen's 1.17 playoff wins per season is 5th among active starters. Clearly Jalen's performance as a winner is at its peak in the moments that matter most.

• Someone (I don't remember who) said on an Eagles podcast this summer: "Hurts can't play from behind". I'm not sure what the logic behind that was, but that's not close to the truth. I don't believe there are any databases that can verify this, but Hurts' 12 wins when trailing by 9+ at some point in the game have to be near if not at the top of the league since 2021. What you can prove is how many 4th quarter comebacks and game winning drives a player has had, and turn those totals into a "comeback success rate" statistic (basically, take the total comebacks and divide that number by comebacks + losses to determine the rate at which a QB turns comeback opportunities into wins). Hurts' average leaguewide rank in these two percentages is 7.5, which is 5th among projected starters.

• Here's where this point really hammers home: since Hurts took over as starter in 2021, his regular season winning percentage as a starter of 71.9% (56-22) is FIRST among all quarterbacks with at least 8 starts. His total W/L% of 70.5% (including playoffs) drops all the way down to... second, behind Mahomes.

• Lastly, Jalen has been notably successful against the 14 QBs that the league consensus apparently believes are better than he is. Here are those players and Jalen's record against them (only counted games in which both players started and finished the game):

Josh Allen (2-0)

Patrick Mahomes (3-2)

Matthew Stafford (4-0)

Joe Burrow (1-0)

Lamar Jackson (1-0)

Dak Prescott (2-3)

Justin Herbert (0-2)

Drake Maye (no games)

Jared Goff (3-0)

Caleb Williams (0-1)

Sam Darnold (1-0)

Brock Purdy (0-2)

Jordan Love (3-0)

Jayden Daniels (2-0)

That's a total record of 22-10 (68.8%), which is nearly the same as his 70.5% mark in all games.

So, in terms of winning, Jalen Hurts is great against great teams, great against great defenses, great in the playoffs, great when trailing, great against great QBs and just great overall.

Jalen Hurts only succeeds because he has a great supporting cast! To be sure, it's fair to point out that Jalen has generally had really good players around him, but it's important to note that this modifier is only consistently applied to Hurts. Why is it not applied to Dak Prescott, who's been blessed with a great OL, solid weapons and (usually) a pretty good defense for ten whole years now? Same goes for Lamar Jackson, who's been in perhaps the best overall organization in football for his entire career? Brock Purdy plays with a team of Pro Bowlers each year, Matthew Stafford was a career losing QB by record as a starter with perfectly average individual stats until he teamed up with QB whisperer Sean McVay, and on and on it goes. Far from being held to a higher standard due to their supporting casts, when these players fail the narrative generally seems to be "He needs more help!". Now, at times that narrative is fair for any player, and again, I'm not claiming that Hurts' success has nothing to do with his supporting cast, but there is absolutely a double standard in how this particular issue is discussed.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In summary, I have tried to show that the NFL is wrong in their QB evaluations and probably wrong about Jalen too, that Hurts' numbers are better than he's given credit for (and better still when you get to the more advanced metrics), that Hurts is a high level winner as good as anyone currently working right now, and that criticisms directed at Hurts regarding his supporting cast are likely overblown. What more do you want? If you treat the regular season winning percentage, the rate of playoff wins per season and the rate of comebacks led as metrics of equal importance to PFF, total QBR and TYP, Jalen jumps from 12th to 4th among NFL starters. To be clear, I don't necessarily think that Hurts is the 4th best QB in this league but to suggest that he's as low as 17th is absurd. My conclusion is that Jalen Hurts is objectively a top ten caliber quarterback in the NFL, and any opinions to the contrary are either overly biased or ill informed.

Now, where exactly in the top ten does Hurts rank? We'll come back to that in a couple weeks.