Hurts says, basically, he lives by something Nick Saban, the former coach of Alabama, once told him, which was: “What you do speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you say.”

He continues: “Well, you say I’m an introvert. I say I’m about action. I’m about doing the things that are required to win. And so I think that’s to one’s interpretation, but you never go wrong doing a thing that can’t be denied.”

I say sure, but on any team, in any workplace even, there are personal dynamics beyond winning and losing. People want to know what their boss thinks about them. They want to know where they stand with their coworkers.

There’s got to be somebody on your team that’s like, “What does my quarterback think about me?”

“Yeah,” says Hurts, because the answer to him is self-evident. The answer is: “Let’s win.”

Hurts tells me, unprompted, that he recently asked ChatGPT about the odds of a hypothetical quarterback, who shares a biography not unlike that of Jalen Hurts, making it to the NFL. Just gave it some minimal information and let it think. It told him: “There’s a 60 to 70 percent chance that he’ll get to the NFL,” Hurts says. “Twenty to 30 percent chance that he would start. And there’s a 5 percent chance that he would be exactly what he is today.”

I’m confused, and tell him so: Shouldn’t all those odds be much, much lower? How many quarterbacks from Channelview, Texas, play in the league? How many of his dad’s other high school players made it? But then it turns out the minimal information, the exact prompt, that Hurts gave to the chatbot was: What are the odds of making it after being benched in the college national championship game?

This, of course, happened to Hurts, and is fundamental to his story as other people tell it and, evidently, how he thinks about himself. After Alabama went down 13-0 to the Georgia Bulldogs in the 2018 championship game, Hurts was removed at halftime, despite having started all year, and replaced by Tua Tagovailoa, who went on to help Alabama come back and win the game. Hurts played one more year at Alabama, primarily as a backup, and then transferred to Oklahoma. He rebuilt himself from being embarrassed on national television and exceeded his odds. “It’s kind of like shooting pool,” Hurts says, about how he did it. “There’s always a shot on the table. How do I figure this out?”

Less cited, though maybe equally relevant to Hurts’s story as a starting quarterback in the NFL, is that he was not in fact drafted to be a starting quarterback in the NFL. The Eagles selected him as a backup in the second round of the 2020 NFL draft, when Carson Wentz was the established starter on the team. Hurts admits that he was surprised when this happened—he hadn’t heard much from the Eagles before they took him. “I figured I’d wait my turn and start in two, three years” was his mentality. And then someone Hurts trusts told him: “Nah, bro, you need to get ready.” By the end of the year, he had replaced Wentz, and by the beginning of the next year, he was starting. The year after that, the 2022 season, the Eagles went to the Super Bowl, where they lost in a game that was among the best that Hurts has ever played. “I remember setting out a goal before that year and saying, ‘We’re going to go to the Super Bowl,’ ” Hurts says. “Now I’m like, ‘Well, shit, I should have said we’re going to go win the Super Bowl.’ Maybe we would have won.”