Hurts injury already sparking familiar ‘next man up’ refrain
Birds could lose momentum without their QB on Saturday
PHILADELPHIA >> Jalen Hurts was barely out of the MRI contraption, yet already the race to sound the all-clear had begun. The best player in football had a shoulder ache and likely would miss games, but somehow that was supposed to be OK.
There were the soothing tones that it could have been worse. There was the relief-sigh that it was, after all, only a sprain. There was the reminder, accurate as it was, that Gardner Minshew had No. 1 quarterback skills. And there surely was the classic suggestion that it was something of a blessing, for now Nick Sirianni could begin to load-manage his better players to have them stronger for the playoffs.
“It’s only a distraction,” A.J. Brown would say after practice Tuesday, “if you let it be.”
The rationalizations, all of them, were familiar carols, flowing from the brilliance of the same sports culture that spawned the popular verbal cure-all known as the next-man-up mentality.
“It’s unfortunate,” Brown said, “but you’ve always got to have the next-man-up mentality.” See?
In defense of the Eagles, they would have nowhere else to turn upon hearing that Hurts was in enough discomfort that he could miss two games. What were they supposed to say, that they would try again next year? But that didn’t mean the public, and to some extent the enabling branch of the media, had to be so quick as to assume that the best team losing the best quarterback three weeks before the end of the season was little more than an inconvenience.
For one reason, the absence of Hurts is a problem, and a big one: It’s a disruption of something that needed anything but disrupting.
Not that the Eagles haven’t had good teams in the past and survived critical injuries — 2017 rings a bell — but no two outfits function exactly the same way. The No. 1 reason the Eagles are