The Jalen Hurts File? All he does is win...
Bob McGinn's series detailing how scouts viewed prospects out of college — and what they're up to now — continues with the Super Bowl MVP in Philadelphia.
This is the continuation of a 2023 series looking at active players and their current situation vis a vis what it was entering the NFL draft. The comments from personnel men were made in the months leading up to the NFL draft for my NFL Draft Series, which dates to 1985. Scouting football players is an inexact science, especially when it comes to off-the-field considerations. It has been said that no two evaluators view a player exactly the same way.
Hall of Fame sports writer Bob McGinn joined Go Long in September 2021.
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By Bob McGinn
In March and April of 2020, I conducted a poll for The Athletic, my employer at the time, of NFL personnel men regarding the top quarterbacks available in the draft.
Seventeen executives participated. Each was asked to rank the top five in order. A first-place vote was worth 5 points, a second was worth 4 and so forth.
It was a tremendous draft for quarterbacks.
The top four vote-getters — Joe Burrow (83 points), Tua Tagovailoa (60), Justin Herbert (55) and Jordan Love (36) — all developed into upper-half-of-the-NFL starters. The scouts had them pegged.
Five others — Jacob Eason (13), Jake Fromm (three), Anthony Gordon (two), Jalen Hurts (two) and Steven Montez (one) — rounded out the voting. The defunct careers of Eason, Fromm, Gordon and Montez were short-lived, to say the least: a combined total of five games played and two games started.
Then there’s Hurts, who already has marched the Philadelphia Eagles to two Super Bowls, winning one, and a well-deserved berth among the 10 finest quarterbacks in football.