Oct. 20, 2026
It is no secret that I have been an ardent fan of Jalen Hurts since he joined the Eagles seven seasons ago. And my contempt for the pomposity and evasiveness of the Eagles organization is something I express in many of these blog posts.
What is happening right now, this week, is way beyond anything I can recall in my 43 years living and working in Philadelphia. We aren’t talking about games or teams anymore; we’re talking about a young man’s life.
Did the Eagles, either knowingly or otherwise, risk Hurts’ well-being by allowing him to play a football game in London knowing he had a blood clot in his leg?
It’s a terrible question to ask, but an entirely valid one right now. His condition was not serious enough to prevent him from joining the team on a seven-hour flight to London, but he ended up in a hospital there after he landed.
And then he was told by the doctors there not to sleep for 36 hours as a precaution against a worsening of his condition.
This is all a lot to process, so I will try to simplify it.
The doctors told him it wasn’t safe to fall asleep, but then someone in a position of authority cleared him to play a football game.
Let that sink in for a second. Sleep was precarious, but getting leveled by a 300-pound lineman — or several 300-pound linemen — was not considered dangerous for him?
I am no medical expert, to be sure. But it doesn’t take one to apply rational thinking here and come away with many potentially damning questions about the decisions made either by the Eagles’ medical and training staffs, or the coaches, or the front office — or maybe all of them.
To his credit, Jeff McLane of The Inquirer was thinking along the same lines when he posed some tough questions at Nick Sirianni’s next-day news conference on October 19. Above all, McLane wanted to know who cleared Hurts to play that game. I’m sure he still wants to know because if there’s one place where you will never get a straight answer, it’s at a Sirianni news conference.
The coach seemed perplexed at the aggressiveness of McLane’s inquisition, and with good reason. Actual journalism has been conspicuous only by its absence on the sports beat for the past few years, and especially in an Eagles’ universe where the message is always under the oppressive control of the PR department. Sirianni wasn’t ready to be challenged because he never is anymore.
Sirianni seemed genuinely annoyed that a journalist was pressing for a real answer to an important question. The coach responded the way he always does, by sticking with a statement that said as little as possible. He treated the inquiry the same way he responds to questions about why he went for it on fourth down or why his staff chose a pass play over a run.
Nothing in the four-paragraph statement issued by the Eagles and Hurts’ agent Nicole Lynn addresses that critical point. Who cleared Hurts to play?
For once, I don’t blame Sirianni for his evasiveness. He’s a football coach, not a doctor. And he is definitely not a billionaire owner like Jeff Lurie or heralded GM like Howie Roseman, both of whom should come out from hiding and address this organizational crisis.
Hey, I know as well as anyone that the team’s brain trust has an unwritten rule not to show its face when the club is facing adversity. I can’t tell you how many times when I was at WIP that our interview requests for Lurie and/or Roseman were ignored during previous crises. The only time you will see Lurie or Roseman poke their heads out is when they can crow about how great they and their team are.
Still, the part of that official statement that bothered me the most was the phrase “In the interest of transparency. . . .”
Oh, please.
The Eagles love to do this — tell you how they never use injuries as an excuse, for example — while actually doing the opposite. If you need to say you’re being transparent, you are hiding something. Actual transparency is answering questions, providing doctors to explain the medical situation, and identifying who made the decision to let Hurts play in London.
What the Eagles don’t realize is that this is an issue that they cannot stonewall. This is more important than the usual football prattle. Lurie and Roseman need to sit in front of a microphone and answer questions like this:
- What was the diagnosis of the Eagles medical staff and trainers the day they discovered the problem?
- Since Hurts couldn’t use blood thinners and play football, how were the doctors treating the blood clot before the flight to London?
- Why did Hurts go to the hospital when he got to London?
- Why did the Eagles rely on the doctors in London to diagnose their franchise quarterback with “superficial vein thrombosis,” a conclusion that proved to be erroneous?
- Did the two long flights make Hurts’ condition worse?
- Why was he cleared to fly for 14 hours round-trip with a blood clot that would ultimately move into his lungs?
That last one is the most important, obviously. It needs to be answered. And it will be answered, whether the Eagles want to address the truth or not, as long as the media does its job for once and refuses to stop asking until they get a proper response.
This time, the question is not about fun and games.
This time, it’s a lot more important than that.