Jalen Hurts owns it all as Philadelphia Eagles sputter in playoff exit

PHILADELPHIA — Throughout his six-season tenure, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts has oft-repeated that the buck stops with him when the team either loses or doesn’t live up to its potential. He’s a process-oriented football player, never content unless all the boxes of success are checked in a game.

It’s cliche at this point for team leaders to take responsibility when their teams fail, but with Hurts there’s a level of sincerity in that action based on how he acts even when his team succeeds. A double-digit victory in which his unit doesn’t play up to their standard? That’s nearly as bad as defeat in his eyes.

So when it came to the defending champion Eagles’ 23-19 loss to the visiting — and short-handed — San Francisco 49ers in the wild-card round of the playoffs, a game in which the former Super Bowl MVP put up pedestrian numbers along with the rest of the offense, he once again put it on himself.

“I take ownership for not being able to put points on the board. It all starts with me and ends with me,” said Hurts, who completed just 57% of his 35 pass attempts for 168 yards and a touchdown. “And so there’s a sense of a lot there that you can learn from. I think as a team, as a collective group and personally for me as a quarterback, how you see the game, how you feel the game, and ultimately just, ‘OK, how can I find a way to win?’ We weren’t able to do that today.”

The Eagles’ offense has looked bad all season. After ranking seventh on that side of the ball last season and improving to No. 1 during the playoff run to a Super Bowl championship, the unit dropped to 18th this season. Running back Saquon Barkley nearly set the single-season rushing record with 2,005 yards and 13 touchdowns in 2025, but had just 1,140 yards and seven scores this year.

And while we’ve seen Hurts improve his play in the postseason in previous years — including last year when just 2,900 passing yards and 18 passing touchdowns in the regular season ended with a nearly 300-yard, three-touchdown performance in a Super Bowl win over the Kansas City Chiefs — that wasn’t the case on Sunday.

Whether it was because of what Philadelphia saw the Seattle Seahawks do to the 49ers last week (180 yards on the ground), the weather (16 mph winds), or a lack of confidence in the passing game, it was clear running the ball was the team’s game plan. The game’s first three plays were handoffs to Barkley, and nine of the first 12 plays of the games were rushes.

They followed that playcalling with diversity and unpredictability: Hurts ran the unit out of the shotgun and under center, the Eagles utilized run-pass options (RPO) and play-actions, and they scored on their first possession using a jet sweep to tight end Dallas Goedert. 

After another score on the first series of the second quarter, a 9-yard pass to Goedert on another RPO to take a 13-7 lead, the Eagles’ offense sputtered the rest of the way against a 49ers team without defensive standouts Nick Bosa and Fred Warner and top receivers Brandon Aiyuk and Ricky Pearsall. All-Pro tight end George Kittle left the game on a medical cart in the first half with an Achilles injury.

Hurts was then pressured by the 49ers’ defense and had multiple plays end in throwaways. Passes to Barkley and DeVonta Smith out of the backfield practically went nowhere. As has been the case all season, the offense barely registered any explosive plays, particularly in the air: Hurts didn’t connect on a pass that traveled more than 20 yards.

Back-to-back deep pass attempts to receiver A.J. Brown near the end of the first half ended up hitting the ground. At that point the frustration — either from the game or the season, or both — boiled over when Fox cameras caught Brown and Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni arguing on the sideline and needing to be separated by Eagles head of security “Big Dom” DiSandro.

On the other hand, the 49ers did benefit from explosive plays: a 61-yard pass to Demarcus Robinson on the second play of the game; a 45-yard pass to Jauan Jennings in the second quarter; a 29-yard touchdown pass from Jennings to running back Christian McCaffrey at the end of the third.

“You’ve got to be able to be explosive,” Sirianni said. “It’s really hard to dink and dunk down the field. It’s really hard to get behind sticks with negative plays. You’ve got to be able to create explosives.”

The first three possessions of the second half were no better, leading to two punts and a 41-yard Jake Elliott field goal to push the lead to 16-10 at the end of the third quarter. The nearly 70,000 fans at Lincoln Financial Field booed their offense off the field more than once. .

“It’s been a common theme for us this year,” said Barkley, who finished with 131 total yards. “We haven’t done a good enough job of playing complete football, putting two halves together. And sometimes you expect you get into this moment and we’ll just figure it out, and it kind of caught up to us.”

Defensive back Quinyon Mitchell exacted revenge from earlier in the game, when he was continually torched by 49ers receivers, by picking off San Francisco quarterback Brock Purdy for the second time early in the fourth to give the Eagles signs of life while trailing 17-16. Barkley’s 23 rushing yards and a 15-yard unnecessary roughness penalty, after a defender hit Hurts on a slide on the ensuing possession, put the Eagles on San Francisco’s 21-yard line.

But on the next play, Barkley had his knee rolled up on, which briefly took him out of the game. It took the air out of the rest of that drive, leading to a 19-16 score after another Elliott field goal.

After another McCaffrey touchdown put the 49ers ahead 23-19, the Eagles got the ball back with 2:54 on the clock in the fourth quarter. Hurts completed five of his first six passes, including a 15-yard dart to Goedert on fourth-and-5.

But over the next three plays, Hurts took a sack, threw a pass out of bounds, and was off target on a pass to Smith. On fourth-and-11 with the season on the line, Hurts threw to Goedert in tight coverage, which was tipped by a 49ers defender and landed on the ground.

“I just didn’t make the play,” Hurts said of that final play. “I own it. I own it all.”

While Hurts turned up his production when his team needed him the most, he and the Eagles played with fire too much on Sunday, and this season, and finally got burned. The numbers don’t fully represent his impact on the game, but as he likes saying, this team’s success and failure starts and ends with him.

And this time, he couldn’t pull off a miracle, ending the Eagles’ championship title defense on the first weekend of the playoffs.

“Obviously you want more. Obviously you work for more,” Hurts said. “But it’s an assessment of how we can improve in the end.

“Regardless of what it looks like, it’s about how you learn from it, how you respond from it. And so, it’s not on any individual, it’s on us as a unit, this team, this year, and we’ve got to improve from it.”

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