The Eagles Somehow Made the Jalen Hurts Situation Even Worse on Monday

Before us is one of the more complex and possibly controversial medical stories the NFL has seen in years, and, coming to the podium, we have Nick Sirianni, a career football coach with a degree in *checks notes* not being a doctor, from Mount Union College. The guy who, bless his heart and I say this in his defense, couldn’t nail his opening press conference talking about football, having an aggressive mentality and playing together, never mind the one about why the quarterback may have flown home from London with blood clots, or played in a football game with them. 

We still need to know much more about Jalen Hurts and his season-ending medical condition. What we know for sure, from a joint statement by the Eagles and Hurts’s agent, Nicole Lynn, is that Hurts needs to take blood thinners to solve what is now being diagnosed as a deep vein thrombosis in addition to bilateral pulmonary emboli. According to that statement, the initial diagnosis in London was a left calf superficial vein thrombosis. 

But what we know for sure is that the person who should have been behind the microphone on Monday was the same one who evaluated Hurts medically and approved both his entry onto the field in Week 5 and a spot on the team plane home afterward. This was woefully unfair to Sirianni, who, while not the ultimate sympathetic figure here, given he’s not the one who may have been suffering from life-threatening blood clots, was chucked outside to create the kind of self-own that dumps lighter fluid onto a story that—just a hunch—everyone at 345 Park and 1 Eagles Drive would prefer went away forever. And if you’re going to tell me that medical professionals don’t normally talk to the media, here’s the landing page for press conferences featuring Rick Burkholder, the vice president of sports medicine and performance for the Chiefs. The same Rick Burkholder who used to work for the Eagles and provide regular press briefings. 

With player approval, having a member of the team’s medical staff address a particular injury is not a HIPAA violation, which is especially true if the injury stems from something football-related. And if the player’s agent and team issued a joint statement, one would assume there could be a world where Sirianni—again, a coach who once had to be asked by his own quarterback to stop taunting the other team during the Super Bowl—didn’t need to go head-to-head with the most (in a good way) ravenous, combative and no-bulls-taking press corps of any NFL beat in America about a sensitive topic way outside his wheelhouse.  

Of course it was disastrous. Of course it looked uncomfortable. And the longer we go on this rickety train ride, where an agent seems to be co-steering the narrative of what might be a very serious medical issue along with a head coach (neither doctors!!) the longer this story will remain prevalent in the public consciousness. 

Before we keep going, a few thoughts that I think are relevant: 

• The initial report, from the Ringer’s and Netflix’s Tom Pelissero, included an anecdote that Hurts had not slept for 36 hours before playing against the Jaguars and that a medical professional in London advised him not to rest due to the issue. That report was clarified to suggest that Hurts did indeed sleep between his diagnosis and when he played.

• After Stephen A. Smith recklessly downplayed Lane Johnson’s desire to focus on his mental health amid his in-season retirement, I remain completely and wholly stunned that Michael Robinson would come out on NFL Network and suggest that Hurts’s blood clot issue was conjured up in an effort to sit out the remainder of what might be a lost season. This is a bit of an aside, but for as much as NFL players talk up a brotherhood, we’ve had Robinson float the idea that superficial blood clots are not serious and Richard Sherman joking about Joey Porter Jr. faking a stomach bug the week before as a contract-negotiation maneuver. This paved the way for former players to openly question Caleb Williams’s toughness for needing a medical cart for his hamstring injury. The amplification of these comments creates a kind of echo chamber that only players have to realistically live in, and disprove by hammering their bodies into oblivion. Engagement is a hell of a drug, man. 

• What I hoped we would all take from Johnson’s retirement is that it’s O.K. not to continuously risk your well-being to be on the football field just to prove some completely ungraspable or undefinable concept of toughness; that, after you retire from the game, you are left with a body and mind that need to carry you the rest of the way. There is an immense difference between the value of a sport building resilience and potentially playing amid a serious medical situation.

• This is purely my opinion: I am not sure what the Eagles would have ultimately gained by sneaking Hurts onto the field knowing he was suffering through a dire medical condition and then parking the franchise quarterback on an airplane to let the condition worsen. Again, doing this knowingly would be one of the most significant medical controversies in NFL history and would require firing an entire medical staff. As Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk noted, demand a reexamination of everything when it comes to the way we treat players. Certainly, there have been high-profile stories of team medical professionals acting negligently, and I am not naive to the fact that a doctor can make a horrible mistake. However, this would represent a multiperson, department-wide breakdown for which I don’t have a reference point. But if this were the case, wouldn’t Hurts’s agent be publicly warring against the Eagles on behalf of her client instead of collaborating on a statement with them? There are so many details about the nuances of the treatment, what was known at the time in London, what kind of testing equipment was available to the Eagles in another country before the team made a decision to play Hurts, and what, ultimately, was passed along to the person or people deciding it was O.K. for Hurts to play. We cannot have this narrative both ways: The Eagles seemed to be preparing for a rebuild and, weeks ago, traded one of their best remaining offensive linemen after the Johnson retirement. They also needed to win a game in the absolute destitute swampland that is the NFC East so badly that they would put a quarterback in a life-threatening situation?  

And if the answer is “yes,” then what the hell is wrong with us? What are we doing here? Don’t stop until anyone within a country mile of this place is on LinkedIn with a #LookingForWork banner. If the answer is “Hey, it’s more complicated than a few words that can fit into the Twitter box,” then let's make an effort to flesh it out. 

Again, these are questions primarily for someone who isn’t Sirianni, who fared just a little better than Bill Belichick relaying the complexities of ideal gas law on Monday. Questions for someone who can provide a detailed timeline. Questions for someone who can do more than point out the obvious, and our only definitive takeaway from Monday: Sirianni is, indeed, not a doctor.