The Greatest Eagles Quarterback Ever

The All-Time Top 5 QB series wraps up for real by looking at quarterbacks who moved up their team's lists in 2024, staring with Jalen Hurts.

Jalen Hurts is the greatest quarterback in Philadelphia Eagles history.

Hurts ranked fourth when I published the All-Time Top Five Eagles QBs last summer. He was coming off a 2023 season during which the Eagles suffered an epic collapse. “Hurts can climb this list with another good-not-great season or two, because that’s the nature of this list,” I wrote. “He could vault to #1 with a return to the Super Bowl. Eagles fans need a quarterback they can feel unequivocally proud of, someone whose career is not tinged with frustration, regret or melancholy, and not some backup pulling a Samwise in the final reel.”

Hurts became that quarterback by leading the Eagles through perhaps the greatest season in their history, then a Super Blowout of the Chiefs. No Eagles quarterback – heck, no Philly team-sports figure since Julius Erving – has led a team to a championship loss, then returned to lead a victory soon after.

Hurts did what Donovan McNabb and Ron Jaworski resoundingly failed to do, what Randall Cunningham never came close to doing and Norm Van Brocklin couldn’t be bothered with, not to mention something that Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson, Eric Lindros and many others could never do. Even the great Phillies teams of the early 2000s couldn’t win a second World Series. The greatest Philly sports teams of all-time up until now were the Broad Street Bully Flyers of 1973-75; they were the city’s only repeat champions in living memory. The current Eagles, extending back to Super Bowl LII, are better. Hurts was not a member of that 2017 team, but he’s the one who rescued the Eagles from their fate as one-time flukes who won with a backup quarterback.

Last week’s final installment of the Tush Push saga galvanized my feelings about Hurts and this version of the Eagles. Nothing could be more “Philly” than having the rest of the league/country scheme behind closed doors to stop you by taking away your signature strategy. And what’s your signature strategy? Something elaborate and clever? No: jamming the ball straight down the opponent’s throat by being bigger, stronger, better prepared and more determined. Wilt Chamberlain wasn’t allowed to dunk from the foul line, and for a while it looked like Hurts would need written permission from the commissioner to run a quarterback sneak.

Yes, I sound like a Iggles homer from Shunk Street, but it felt like the NFL wanted to place an asterisk next to Super Bowl LIX. The folks in my neighborhood, in my text messages and on my Facebook feed celebrated the failure of the Tush Push Ban as if the Eagles won a second Super Bowl. It felt as though we were awaiting a replay review for three months to see if the Eagles had really won, or the verdict to some trial.

The Tush Push is Hurts’ legacy. It’s something he has done that none of his peers are willing to do. Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes and others won’t even sneak. Josh Allen got pushed a few times and clearly didn’t like it; Sean McDermott became the Carrie Nation of the Tush Push to defend his Thor-shaped quarterback and his staff’s inability to find an alternative that worked when it mattered. Hurts does the ugly dirty work other quarterbacks either can’t or won’t do.

What greater qualification for Greatest PHILLY quarterback of all time can anyone ask for?

Here are some other quarterbacks who moved up or down lists during the All Time Top 5 series.

Josh Allen

“To climb past Kelly, Allen must at least reach a Super Bowl, or win an MVP, or do something substantive that Kelly never did,” I wrote when ranking Allen second to Jim Kelly last year. Allen won that MVP award, so I am comfortable ranking him as the greatest quarterback in Bills history.

Joe Burrow

Burrow moved past Carson Palmer into third place on the All-Time Bengals list by throwing for 12 bajillion yards for a team with no defense last year. He still ranks behind Boomer Esiason and Ken Anderson. For Burrow to challenge them, I would like to see another deep playoff run, not just gobs of stats. To climb historic lists, quarterbacks must do historic things.

Jayden Daniels

He’s now 10th on the All-Time Washington list, bumping Mark Brunell. To pass Robert Griffin, Daniels must do literally anything positive to follow up his remarkable rookie year.

Jared Goff

Goff now moves into second place on the Lions list, past Matthew Stafford but behind Bobby Layne. Stafford always looked like a better quarterback than Goff, but that may be a product of the years he spent in that Justin Herbert liminal space where his team lost games but the viral highlights were amazeballs. Goff has helped make the Lions worthy of our weekly attention.

Jordan Love

Love climbs into sixth place on the Packers list, ahead of Don Majkowski. I might have pushed him past Tobin Rote if I hadn’t recently rewatched the Packers playoff loss to the Eagles. If you want to leap over an old-timey legend, don’t throw interceptions directly into Zack Baun’s belly.

Baker Mayfield

Mayfield vaults all the way from 10th to fourth on the Buccaneers list based on last season. Mayfield has developed into a quality starter, and he’s only leaping over Vinny Testaverde, Jameis Winston and a bunch of guys who wouldn’t make most franchises’ all-time lists.

C.J. Stroud

Stroud survived long enough behind a rotted-out offensive line to pass Deshaun Watson and move into second place on the All-Time Texans list. Stroud is one more good year away from topping Matt Schaub. It’s not clear whether his offensive line will allow him to do it.

I don’t feel the need to move Justin Herbert, Trevor Lawrence, Dak Prescott or Tua Tagovailoa around based on what we saw last year. Maybe Bo Nix belongs on the bottom of the Broncos list. I don’t care enough to think too hard about it.

Photo by All Pro Reels via Creative Commons Share-Alike

And Finally …

Sometimes, when reading and selecting old quotes for the All Time Top-5 series, I imagined myself living and working like one of those great NFL features writers of yesteryear, like Tex Maule, Frank Deford or Dr. Z.

The access. The prestige. The EXPENSE ACCOUNT. Training camp summers in the dormitories. Post-game cocktails with the coach at the hotel bars. The quarterback’s home phone number on a spinning Rolodex. Maybe his wife answers and tells you how his shoulder really feels.

You can feel the August heat and January chill in those old features, smell the sweat and whiskey breath, hear the tape being ripped from a swollen ankle. I fantasize about learning the secrets of the locker room and crafting the purple prose while nursing a hangover. I never fantasize about pounding out said prose on a Smith Corona typewriter, mailing or dictating copy to an editor, or needing a dictionary to spell the big words and a media guide for the most basic stats. My mind glosses over the 1,000 other realities of mid-to-late-20th-century journalism, right down to not being able to treat that hotel hangover with Dunkin’ or Starbucks.

Even the most connected modern NFL insider cannot achieve the level of access those old scribes got, because no one gives anyone else such access to their lives anymore. Quarterbacks have agents and publicists. Team media departments are stronger and more adversarial to reporters now than they were even when I started out. But even ordinary people don’t need layers of handlers to keep the world at a distance. We have emails, texts, chats and social-media platforms for that.

Players and reporters talked to each other casually in the olden days because there wasn’t much else to do after practice in Reading or Mankato on an August weeknight: no smartphones, no video games, no portable headphones to shut the world out until the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979. Oh, and the quarterback didn’t make 2500 times more money than the writer back then, so they might have something in common to talk about.

Romanticized prose also sounds out-of-place in our sanitized era. Every team training facility is a combination state-of-the-art fitness center, corporate headquarters and maximum-security bunker. The quarterback goes to work in East Rutherford or Owings Mills, then drives home to a McMansion in a gated community. When famous quarterbacks do something interesting someplace interesting – when Tom Brady and Matthew Stafford just happen to bump into each other at a ski resort, far from the prying eyes of non-millionaires – the most well-connected-and-compensated reporters in the industry literally try to beat the crap out of each another over the tiny scrap of a story.

So it’s nearly impossible to write elegiac prose about modern quarterbacks living mostly sanitized, cloistered, homogenized lifestyles. Internet sportswriting punk-rockers realized that 20 years ago, when folks like me began getting published. Some of those early 2000s bad boys, like Mike Florio, wanted to pull back the NFL’s veil all the way. Others, like Will Leitch and his imitators, wanted to shoot spitballs at the league’s pomposity. Still others, like Aaron Schatz, wanted deeper analysis instead of pastoral poetry. We all knew, deep down, that those epic magazine profiles were full of beans. As beautiful as the tale of Billy Kilmer drunk-driving into a river sounds when Jim Murray is channeling Raymond Chandler, we were being told about a Rashee Rice or Jalen Carter situation as if it were some youthful indiscretion like toilet papering the coach’s house. Once we started getting information 24/7/365, at first on our televisions and desktops, we became skeptical of the mythmaking. The low-speed chase may have been the tipping point, particularly for football fans.

The quarterbacks in those old Sports Illustrated quotes sound older than today’s quarterbacks. Maybe that’s just a trick of my mind, which reads an offhand topical mention of Watergate or Vietnam and auto-inserts a man my father’s age. But the quarterbacks of yesteryear played poker and drank Scotch with their pals all night at hunting or fishing lodges. None had ever touched a video game. They stopped caring about Batman or Superman by junior high. They never replied to an Instagram post. These were men who could look under the hood of a car and say, “There’s your problem” with accuracy.

Dan Pastorini was sneaking past Lee Majors for serious snugglebunnies with Farrah Fawcett at roughly the same age that Josh Allen is now that he is engaged to Hailee Stanfield. Two quarterbacks involved with comely actresses. But one feels like a hairy-chested character ripped from the cover of some page-turner about lust and betrayal, the other like a kooky post-grad dating a gal who still dresses up for Comic-Con. Though, come to think of it, Farrah was famous for playing what was essentially a member of a team of superheroes, too.

All the manly-manly-manliness of those old features, toxicity and all, intersects organically with football’s hyper-masculine culture, so those old quarterbacks sound more like REAL FOOTBALL MEN than today’s players. You are free to love that or hate it. But if I were teleported back into Tex Maule’s body with my current values, I probably wouldn’t be able to get through a ten-minute interview with any midcentury football player without hearing some casual slur that would make my hair stand on end. And what would they think of a sportswriter who enjoys comic books? One who, for well over a decade, “worked from home” (WTF does that mean? our 70s tough guys ask) and performed the traditional duties of a housewife?

When we read old snippets from Sports Illustrated or the sports pages of the New York Times or Washington Post, we visit a past where they did things differently. Yet I blundered in seeking answers to very silly questions like: was John Brodie better than Brock Purdy? John Hadl than Justin Herbert? Craig Morton than Dak Prescott?

Several of the quarterbacks in our All-Time Top 5 series fought in wars before embarking on their pro football careers. Many were surely slapped around by the nuns in elementary school. Their high school fields were cracked and rutted, and they were lucky if they got to drink from a hose in between summer two-a-days. Some faced serious questions about which league they should play for. A few chose poorly. No black quarterback had a fighting chance of being part of this series until the late 1970s, and many still clang their heads against one bias or another. And before we celebrate finally erasing most of the color line, we are probably at least a decade away from the first openly gay quarterback, and moving backwards.

With Bryce Young, Caleb Williams and now Shedeur Sanders, it feels like another generational page is turning. The helicopter-parented quarterback has arrived. In 20 years, Patrick Mahomes and Kyler Murray may come across like rugged individualists for (mostly) sidelining their semi-famous fathers when they entered the NFL. Back in those days, players didn’t bring their fathers and therapy pets to training camp I may write in my deepest “get off my lawn” dudgeon if we revisit this series again in 15 years.

Of course, John Elway, Dan Marino and Jim Kelly were all once considered callow youths too, what with their agents, contract demands, drug whispers and limo rides. How different is the Caleb we meet in Seth Wickersham’s new book from Kelly or Elway, who had the options of the USFL and the Yankees to fall back on? Come to think of it, how different were Cam Newton and Jim McMahon from each other? The punky icons and entertainers with injury-shortened careers tend to pile up as they recede into history.

Who is better? What a silly question! Who is better: the guy who called his own plays or the one who had to digest a Tolstoy-sized playbook? The one who got beer poured on him by the local fans after an interception or the one who got death threats on Twitter? The one whose high school coach made him run laps in the rain or the one whose dad drove him 300 miles to some performance academy while his pals were goofing off on weekends? The one who held onto a starting job for six years in an era with no free agency and rapid expansion or the one who played six extra years because knee surgery now actually works?

Who is better? is a modern question, one the scribes of yesteryear did not care to answer. There was no fantasy football in the glory days of the weekly Sports Illustrated. Gamblers got their information from gold sheets, not prestige journalists. And fans rarely saw out-of-town teams play: who cares if someone is a “Top 10 QB” when he’s never on television?

Many fans my age who swear by the greatness of Archie Manning may have only seen him play once or twice in their lives in the days before satellites, Thursday Night Football, NFL Plus or even Chris Berman’s NFL Primetime. Dr. Z wanted us to know how much better Archie was than his team’s win-loss record, but I don’t think the good doctor or his audience would have wanted to seriously consider whether he was better than Ron Jaworski or Doug Williams, comparisons I made during Archie’s segment. It was a question few cared about.

Now, everyone cares. Purdy declares himself a top-ten quarterback after signing a giant contract, and my colleagues race to the marketplace with content like this. That’s the legacy of Internet journalism, and all the evils which has sprung from it. Features from yesteryear were undeniably written by humans for humans. You cannot be sure anymore. I worry about the talented young writers I know who have been forced to learn awful habits to make money in the current marketplace. The person who could write the most compelling feature on Arch Manning – someone with the journalistic and literary talent to really tell us what life is like for a bonny prince born with fame/expectations into the world of NIL – is busily trying to out-bot the AI bots on 10 bylines per day just to make rent.

The greatest irony of a media landscape dominated by folks twiddling with Top Ten-type lists is that literally anyone can make a credible Top Ten list now. You, dear reader, have more resources at your fingertips than Dr. Z ever dreamed of. You probably watch more football than he did. If all we are doing is arguing about Purdy, Hurts or Herbert, all of us get to be equally right or wrong from our own pulpits.

That may be why I responded so viscerally to those old features. Their writers appeared to be so far above the fray. They were writing about the meatier issues of life: aspiration, ambition, redemption, leadership and teamwork. They wrote without a hint of irony. They wrote under the assumption of a shared value system. They told us more about their times than about their subjects.

Who is better: the 1970s quarterback or the 2020s quarterback? Who is better: Tex Maule or Ty Dunne? Dr. Z. or Seth Wickersham? What’s better: getting Too Deep Zone delivered to your tablet or waiting a full week for Sports Illustrated to contextualize the Super Bowl for you? Why not compare today’s socio-political tumult to the days of Watergate/Vietnam/OPEC/Stonewall/Black Panthers/Women’s Liberation/You-Get-the-Idea while we are at it. (Come to think of it: please refrain from doing so in the comments.)

Quarterbacks are different. Sportswriting is different. Society is different. At least, when writing and talking about quarterbacks, we can come close to finding non-controversial answers, and have fun doing so.

All that’s certain, after this long ramble, is that cities and regions erupt in jubilation when a quarterback leads his team to a Super Bowl victory. Fireworks burst in neighborhood back yards. Corner bars fill up with late-night, work-night revelers. Schools close. Cheers rise up through nursing homes. The pride and validation, even for the jaded and clinically detached, can cut through everyday anxiety and anguish. The whole universe might feel like it’s upside down, the skies dark, the land parched, the future ominous. But that jolt of athletic triumph, that little surge of vicarious validation, can reignite optimism.

This series has been the story of the 100-plus quarterbacks who brought the most triumph, hope and jubilation into our lives over the last century. The order doesn’t necessarily matter. But the experience does.