Hurts says, basically, he lives by something Nick Saban, the former coach of Alabama, once told him, which was: \u201cWhat you do speaks so loudly, I can\u2019t hear what you say.\u201d<\/p>\n
He continues: \u201cWell, you say I\u2019m an introvert. I say I\u2019m about action. I\u2019m about doing the things that are required to win. And so I think that\u2019s to one\u2019s interpretation, but you never go wrong doing a thing that can\u2019t be denied.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s got to be somebody on your team that\u2019s like, \u201cWhat does my quarterback think about me?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah,\u201d says Hurts, because the answer to him is self-evident. The answer is: \u201cLet\u2019s win.\u201d<\/p>\n
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: \u201cThere\u2019s a 60 to 70 percent chance that he\u2019ll get to the NFL,\u201d Hurts says. \u201cTwenty to 30 percent chance that he would start. And there\u2019s a 5 percent chance that he would be exactly what he is today.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m confused, and tell him so: Shouldn\u2019t all those odds be much, much lower? How many quarterbacks from Channelview, Texas, play in the league? How many of his dad\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like shooting pool,\u201d Hurts says, about how he did it. \u201cThere\u2019s always a shot on the table. How do I figure this out?\u201d<\/p>\n
Less cited, though maybe equally relevant to Hurts\u2019s 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\u2014he hadn\u2019t heard much from the Eagles before they took him. \u201cI figured I\u2019d wait my turn and start in two, three years\u201d was his mentality. And then someone Hurts trusts told him: \u201cNah, bro, you need to get ready.\u201d 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. \u201cI remember setting out a goal before that year and saying, \u2018We\u2019re going to go to the Super Bowl,\u2019\u2009\u201d Hurts says. \u201cNow I\u2019m like, \u2018Well, shit, I should have said we\u2019re going to go win the Super Bowl.\u2019 Maybe we would have won.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hurts says, basically, he lives by something Nick Saban, the former coach of Alabama, once told him, which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":876287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,596,593,1260,85],"class_list":["post-876286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-nfl","tag-philadelphia-eagles","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=876286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/876287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}