Jalen Hurts Says He Cried After He Got Benched at Alabama

IT MIGHT BE hard to remember a time when Jalen Hurts’s career wasn’t filled with a nonstop stream of success. The Philadelphia Eagles quarterback, who earlier this year won Super Bowl MVP honors as he led his team to a 40-22 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs, has been one of the league’s best QBs for the last three years after settling into his position by the start of the 2022 season. Not only has he led the Eagles to a consistent winning record and playoff appearances, but he’s revolutionized the position with the way he’s able to achieve short-yardage success with the team’s famous “tush push” play. He’s also scored an incredible 52 rushing touchdowns over the last four seasons, a number previously unheard of for someone playing the quarterback position.

While he’s currently at a high point in his career, things weren’t always looking so rosy for the 26-year-old playmaker. On January 8, 2018—after leading the University of Alabama to a 26-2 record in his two seasons as starter and an appearance in the National Championship game against Georgia—Hurts was benched after an abysmal first half in which the Crimson Tide fell behind 13-0. True freshman QB Tua Tagovailoa entered and led Alabama back to an eventual 26-23 victory. Now, years later, Hurts is reflecting on the experience—and how it helped shape him into the man he is today.

“A lot of my first impression of the world was getting pulled out of that game,” he says in a new Men’s Health cover story. “As competitive as I am and as hard as I am on myself, I only lost two games and I’ve been replaced.”

Getting benched during what was, to that point, the biggest moment of his career, proved to be vital to Hurts’s origin story. Despite the team pulling out a victory, it still hit him hard, and gave him an obstacle to eventually overcome. When he got to his hotel afterwards, he broke down in the arms of his father, Averion (who is also his long-time coach). “I remember I cried on his shoulder,” he says. “I cried, asking him what we were gonna do. What was I gonna do? I say this like, once I process something, I can move on.”

His dad encouraged him to keep going, saying that they would not go down without a fight. “I respected that because that paved the way for me to believe I could overcome anything,” Hurts says.

Hurts would go on to play another year for Alabama (as Tagovailoa’s backup) before transferring to Oklahoma, where he wound up leading the team to a 12-1 record, finishing as the Heisman runner-up, and getting drafted into the NFL as a second-round pick of the Eagles. While his first couple of seasons were a bit bumpy, the rest is history. And at only 26, there’s plenty more to his story that remains to be written.

“From a grand point of view, the triumph and the journey and what it took, no one sees or knows or can comprehend,” Hurts says. “But ultimately, I’m grateful for the challenges because it did something for me that success never would have.”

Read Hurts’s full Men’s Health cover story here.