Jalen Hurts Is the Ultimate Wild Card in and Beyond Super Bowl LVII

Define Jalen Hurts.

It isn't easy. NFL quarterback. Second-round draft pick. MVP candidate. Potential Super Bowl champion. Phenom? Maybe. Superstar? Debatable.

What we do know is Hurts had a hell of a year for the NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles, and that at the age of 24 he would become the fourth-youngest starting quarterback to win a Super Bowl if the Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night.

We know that Hurts was an unbelievably inaccurate passer during a 2020 rookie season in which he completed just 52.0 percent of his passes and would have ranked dead-last by a large margin in on-target rate if qualified.

And we know that in just two years, he has flipped that script (he ranked seventh in that metric during his breakout 2022 campaign).

"He put in a lot of work with timing and footwork and fundamentals," Eagles offensive coordinator Shane Steichen told me Thursday about that turnaround. "But his talent's always been there. He's been a winner in high school, at Alabama, at Oklahoma. Obviously we got him Year 2, and he just continued to climb."

We also know that while the sample size is small, the Oklahoma and Alabama product hasn't been quite himself since returning from a late-season shoulder injury. In three games since coming back from said injury, he's completed 60.7 percent of his passes (compared to 67.3 prior to that) and has posted an 80.6 passer rating (down from a pre-injury rate of 104.6).

All of that makes Hurts a hell of a wild card for Sunday's Super Bowl, and beyond that as he enters the final season of a rookie contract that doesn't contain an option because he wasn't a first-round selection.

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His team is favored to win that game, and he and Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes are basically co-favorites to win MVP Sunday evening. A victorious, MVP performance could propel Hurts to elite status (and elite money) very soon, but another "meh" display in a loss could indicate he's hit a wall.

At that point, you could argue he's yet to put together one full awesome season, although the state of that throwing shoulder could work as an excuse for the sudden drop-off in performance.

"The three games we've played since he's been back have been pretty unique," Eagles quarterbacks coach Brian Johnson told me Thursday, contextualizing Hurts' recent statistical decline. And he's got a point because they played a soft New York Giants run defense twice and their two playoff wins were blowouts so Hurts didn't need to do much. "He's managing everything that he needs to in order for us to win."

Few would likely be shocked if this season's fourth-highest-rated passer put together a legendary performance against a good-but-beatable defense on Sunday, and would it be totally surprising if he were to struggle in his first experience on this super-sized stage?

Age is still on Hurts' side, so you'd be silly to write him off based only on a potentially injury-related slump late in his second full season as an NFL starter, but that'd likely be enough for the Eagles to hit pause on the mega-contract buzz that otherwise would start to take off soon after Super Bowl LVII.

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The Super Bowl may very well hinge on Mahomes' ankle, but it's as likely to sway one way or another based on how prepared Hurts is for this moment. And beyond Sunday, he'll likely enter 2023 as one of the league's most intriguing but enigmatic figures.

"Once the season's over we'll sit down and break out what we need to work on and what strengths we need to continue to build," Johnson said, adding that he'd "never put a limit on" Hurts' potential.

"Nothing he does surprises me because of the work ethic that he has," Johnson said.

Will this moment in Hurts' career eventually be remembered as the peak for a player who was never expected to become a superstar but delivered in one aberrational season, or will it one day be viewed as just the start of a special run for a special player?

His performance Sunday won't completely answer that question, but it will likely spawn strong opinions either way and dictate how we see Hurts throughout the 2023 offseason.