The Philadelphia Eagles have placed starting quarterback Jalen Hurts on injured reserve after a blood clot moved deeper into Hurts’ calf and then spread to his lungs, per a team statement.
Hurts’ diagnosis has shifted rapidly — from doctors discovering a superficial blood clot in his calf on Saturday, Oct. 10 to Hurts playing the Jacksonville Jaguars in London on Oct. 11 to doctors discovering movement in the clot on Oct. 14.
By Oct. 15, last Thursday,Hurts was ruled out for the weekend. By Saturday, he was placed on the minimum-four-week injured reserve. And on Monday, the Eagles announced that Hurts’ blood clot had not just moved to the deep veins of his calf but also reached his lungs — a dramatic swing from the initial injury that didn’t restrict Hurts’ clearance to play or travel.
What exactly is the Eagles quarterback experiencing and what does it mean for his short- and long-term health? Yahoo Sports spoke to two medical experts to better understand.
Dr. Ben Levine is a professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern and director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine, a collaboration between UT Southwestern and Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. Dr. Thomas Maldonado is a professor of vascular surgery at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
Neither physician has worked with Hurts directly. Each spoke by phone generally about their experience studying and treating patients with blood clots, including Levine’s experience studyingclinical considerations for competitive athletes diagnosed with blood clots.
Here’s some of what we learned from their guidance:
What is the difference between Hurts’ initial diagnosis and his current one?
Doctors in London initially diagnosed Hurts with a superficial blood clot, the Eagles said in a Thursday statement. That constitutes a blood clot closer to the skin and above the fascia, a layer of tissue. Back in Philadelphia, Hurts’ diagnosis was updated to a deep vein clot (clinically a deep vein “thrombosis”) which spread to both of Hurts’ lungs (“bilateral pulmonary emboli,” as the Eagles and Hurts’ agent Nicole Lynn said in a statement). How does one become the other?
“In this particular case, there was a component in the deep system, whether that was there at the get-go or whether that resulted because the clot in the superficial vein spilled into the deep vein,” Maldonado said. “These veins connect usually up in the groin or sometimes behind the knee, the superficial and the deep connect and come together. And sometimes if there's a clot very close to that connection or junction, then that can spill into the deep system and that's very likely what happened here.”
Clots that travel to the lungs can block or clog an artery, and in severe cases be fatal, Maldonado said. Larger clots are at greater risk of clogging arteries and triggering fatalities. The Eagles’ statement that Hurts is “clinically stable and has no significant functional limitations” suggests those more severe outcomes, at this point, have been avoided.
— Nicole Lynn (@AgentNicoleLynn) October 19, 2026
Hurts had a blood clot and played in London. Now he can’t play. Why?
This might feel like an obvious question, but the answer is less obvious. The blood clot itself is not what’s keeping Hurts from playing. Rather, the blood-thinning medication (“anticoagulation,” clinically) is keeping him from playing football. Superficial blood clots are not typically treated with blood thinners, Levine and Maldonado said. Once the clot was found to have moved deeper — and, now, to the lungs — blood thinners become the treatment plan and the hindrance to football. The risk of bleeding from a contact injury and then not clotting while on the blood-thinning medication is too high.
“You give an anticoagulant to protect the veins from getting more blood clots and to prevent even more blood clots from breaking off and flowing into the lungs…” Levine said. “Sports where collision is part and parcel of the game … you can imagine that if you're giving a blood thinner to prevent blood clotting, that if you got hit hard in the head, for example, you might get a hemorrhage or blood bleeding into your brain or into another part of your body, which wouldn't be so good. So those are conditions where you would be pretty cautious and concerned about someone who's on a blood thinner playing that sport.”
How long will Jalen Hurts be out?
Again, neither of these physicians have treated Hurts. But each agreed that the typical recovery timeline on blood-thinners after a clot moves into deep veins and lungs is three to six months. An ultrasound at three months could determine whether the clots have “healed” or dissipated. Hurts’ age (28) plays to his favor as does his seeming ability to determine what triggered these clots: Hurts was kicked in the calf with a cleat on Oct. 4, a local trauma that could produce a clot. He also flew from Philadelphia to London and back for the game, a roughly seven-plus hour flight each way. Long flights, and particularly the immobility and/or dehydration that can come with flights, can provoke clots.
“If you know and can clearly see when it happened and why, typically the recommendations are the wiggle room is three to six months,” Levine said. “I think even the most liberal doctors who manage these conditions would want to make sure that someone was fully anti-coagulated for at least three months. … If it's a clear, provoked event, and you can document that the vein is opened and that they're in the leg, for example, if that's where it occurred, that there's good blood flow, that there's no further evidence of unresolved blood clots in the lung, that the right ventricle (the lower right chamber of the heart) is functioning normally, then at three months you can start to have that discussion.”
The Eagles and Lynn said in their statement that Hurts’ “prognosis is very good, and we expect a full recovery,” including the return to contact football once off blood thinners.
Could the long flights to play internationally have contributed to Hurts’ diagnosis?
It’s impossible for doctors who haven’t examined Hurts to determine which risk factor triggered Hurts. But “long plane rides are notorious for increasing the risk of having a blood clot in the leg because you're stuck,” Levine said, “and for big people like American football players, even a first-class seat can be pretty tight. So you're stuck and you can't move and you're very still and you're not moving your muscles. When you contract your muscles, that pushes the blood back to the heart and keeps the blood moving. But if your legs are pointed down and you're stuck there in a tight spot, it increases the risk of what we call stasis. That means the blood's not moving through the veins.”
Immobility, in particular, is the concern on flights given how calf contractions help move blood back to the heart and reduce the chance of clotting.
“That's why people who have long plane travel, sometimes we encourage them to get up, stretch their legs, walk around, stay hydrated, avoid things like alcohol or caffeine that can dehydrate you on a plane,” Maldonado said. “Compression stocking sometimes people wear on a plane to help give external support and prevent blood from pooling in the calves. Flexing your heels, ‘pumping the gas,’ so to speak — getting that calf muscle working.”
The NFLPA sent a travel kit to all players on teams playing international games, a union spokesperson told Yahoo Sports. The kit included Firefly recovery devices designed to improve blood circulation and EXOS travel exercises.
Is it unusual for a superficial blood clot to become a deep blood clot?
Each doctor confirmed that most superficial blood clots, such as the clot that forms in a vein after receiving an IV or giving blood, do not enter the deep vein nor travel beyond.
Levine described the transition of a clot from superficial to deep as “very rare,” while Maldonado noted that by definition, Hurts had a deep clot at some point.
“Whether it was a superficial clot that then as a result of this sort of setting propagated into the deep system or whether it was really both a superficial and deep clot is hard to say, but it's that combination of the perfect storm of being on a long plane trip, [possibly] dehydrated, et cetera, immobile that” could cause this, Maldonado said. “In the superficial clot that he developed, it's very unusual for it to result in this scenario where it's gone to the lungs. But now that it's gone to the lungs, now they're going to treat this as a much more unstable situation where they want to make sure he doesn't have other blood clots going to the lungs.”
In the interim, Hurts can and will remain around the team conditioning in non-contact ways, the Eagles and Lynn said in the statement.
“We anticipate that he will have no long-term effects,” the statement said. “We are thinking of Jalen and looking forward to a strong recovery.”