By Geoffrey A Knox, Eagles Wire
(Source Yahoo!sports)
A tale of two halves. That’s what we call games like this, the Philadelphia Eagles‘ Week 17 trip to upstate New York. This one will be remembered as the evening they survived a scare from a Buffalo Bills team that wouldn’t go away.
A wintry mix was on the menu. That came later. The skies were relatively calm during the pregame. The first two quarters led to a Bills shutout and a 13-0 lead for the visitors.
Jalen Hurts started decently: 14 completions on 21 pass attempts, 14 completions, one passing touchdown, one rush for four yards, a 96.3 passer rating, and zero sacks. Philadelphia’s defense hummed. They took a trip to the locker room, and when they re-emerged, it was almost as if different guys were on the field wearing the same white-on-black jersey combination.
Jalen Hurts does the unthinkable, wins anyway, and earns a dubious distinction.
We hate to ask you to do this, but think back to the frustrations of Week 4 and Philadelphia’s win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Birds carried a 24-6 lead into halftime. Jalen Hurts didn’t complete another pass for the remainder of the contest, and once the defense ran out of gas, due to no fault of their own, Philadelphia wound up surviving a late and furious Buccaneers rally.
‘It’s no big deal, ‘ we said. A win is a win! It’s early. This won’t happen again, we thought. Well, it happened again, 13 weeks later in Orchard Park. The Eagles’ defense was again asked to battle fatigue, overcome a late rally, and lift the entire team to victory after the offense offered nothing during the third and fourth quarters.
Jalen Hurts failed to complete a second-half pass for the second time this season. He earned a unique mention as a result. He’s 2-0 when failing to complete a pass after halftime.
While Hurts would lament that he’s okay with that as long as his team wins, you can understand why that would create concern for everybody else. This isn’t what anyone wants to see from their quarterback or offense with the playoffs kicking off in two weeks.
We know what you are thinking and asking yourselves. How on Planet Earth does something like this happen? Is this Jalen Hurts’ fault? Is this Kevin Patullo’s fault? Is this Nick Sirianni’s fault? Is this the result of Saquon Barkley’s drop-off?
Ladies and gentlemen. We’ve asked ourselves these same questions all year. We’re seemingly no closer to finding any answers, but we’re all certain of two things.
First, if what Hurts has done in these two games has happened before, we don’t remember when it was. Second, we’d rather not see stats like these postgame ever again.
This article originally appeared on Eagles Wire: Jalen Hurts has won two games without completing a pass in 2nd half
