Best 7 Love Hurts Quotes | Quotes About Love

 Eagles quarterbacks coach Brian Johnson has known Jalen Hurts since the Eagles’ starting quarterback was 4 years old.

So this has been a long time coming.

“It’s very interesting because I’ve known him for a really long time but this was actually my first time getting a chance to work with him on the grass,” Johnson said Tuesday, a few days after the Eagles wrapped up their spring practices.

“Obviously, everyone knows about his intangibles and what type of player and what type of person he is, but he’s extremely coachable. He wants to be a great player. He works extremely hard at his craft. He’s very serious about becoming a great player and it’s been a pleasure to be out there on the grass with him.”

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Johnson grew up in the Houston area and played high school football at Baytown Lee High School, where one of his coaches was Averion Hurts, Jalen’s father. So Johnson remembers a preschool age Jalen Hurts hanging out and running around the field house nearly two decades ago. And Jalen remembers wanting to be like Johnson as a little kid.

Eventually, Johnson went on to play at Utah and then entered the coaching world as Jalen Hurts began his ascent as a player. Johnson even tried to recruit Hurts to Mississippi State when he was their quarterbacks coach; Hurts instead went to Alabama.

So it didn’t work out back then, but Johnson and Hurts developed a strong relationship that ought to help the pair now that they’re finally getting the opportunity to work together in Philly.

“He always talked about getting the chance to coach me,” Hurts said earlier this offseason. “Obviously, me not going to Mississippi State or Florida, that didn’t happen. But now he’s with Philly and I guess it was all meant to be. I know he’s excited. I’m excited. We want to do something special together.”

Johnson, 34, was one of the hottest names in college football after a few seasons with the Gators. While many of the new coaches on staff had deep connections with Nick Sirianni or Jonathan Gannon, Johnson didn’t. He was simply the best candidate for the job and really impressed Sirianni during his interview. Heck, Johnson might be a future head coach in the NFL.

So the Eagles didn’t hire Johnson simply because of his connection to Hurts. Or at all. But that doesn’t mean it won’t help the team, at least in the short-term.

The relationship between Johnson and Hurts has been well-documented since Johnson took the Eagles’ quarterbacks coach position earlier this offseason. But the relationship between those two really began with the relationship between Johnson and Hurts’ father.

There’s an inherent bond between coach and player. Johnson will now get to experience the other side of that with the Hurts family.

“I’ve known Coach (Averion) Hurts since I was 15 years old and he’s always been someone that I’ve had a ton of respect for, not only as a coach but as a father as well,” Johnson said. “Like I said, I’ve spent a lot of time with him over the course of the years, throughout my development as a player and as a coach. He’s someone who I have a tremendous amount of respect for.”

Hurts, 22, will be the Eagles’ starting quarterback in his second NFL season. The Eagles took him at No. 53 last season but didn’t plan on making him their starter until the offense looked broken last year and Doug Pederson ultimately decided to bench Carson Wentz. Now, Pederson is gone, Wentz is gone and Hurts is the incumbent starter under Sirianni, who will mold his offense to fit Hurts’ strengths.

Of course, there’s no guarantee Hurts will be the Eagles’ long-term starter. They’ll likely have three first-round picks next year, plenty of ammo to find their next franchise quarterback if Hurts doesn’t prove to be the guy.

In order for Hurts to prove he can be that franchise quarterback, he’ll need to improve his accuracy. It was a small sample size in 2020, and he was pushing the ball down the field, but Hurts completed just 52% of his passes last year. That was the worst percentage in the NFL among players with at least 100 passing attempts.

So how can that be fixed?

“I think the biggest thing in terms of accuracy is developing your feet and your eyes and making sure that everything’s in concert with your target and having just a great understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish as an offense,” Johnson said. “I’ve been extremely pleased with how he’s handled the installs, both he and Joe, in terms of learning the offense and coming in fully prepared and putting us in a position to hit the ground running once we get to training camp.”

While Johnson came to the Eagles after a few seasons at Florida and one at Houston, he really made a name for himself as the quarterbacks coach at Mississippi State from 2014-16, when he coached Dak Prescott.

Prescott wasn’t a first-round pick (he was a 4th-rounder in 2016) but has become a very good starting quarterback for the Cowboys and is unquestionably their franchise guy.

The hope in Philly is that Hurts can follow a similar path. If he does, the relationship between he and Johnson will likely play a major role.

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NFL Eagles, Not MSU Bulldogs, Unite Jalen Hurts With QB Coach

Brian Johnson had hoped to coach Jalen Hurts in college. That didn’t happen. But now Johnson is getting that opportunity as the Philadelphia Eagles’ quarterbacks coach.

“I’ve known him for a really long time,” Johnson said of Hurts during the Eagles’ offseason program, “but this was actually my first time getting a chance to work with him on the grass. Obviously, everyone knows about his intangibles and what type of player and what type of person he is. But he’s extremely coachable. He wants to be a great player. He works extremely hard at his craft. He’s very serious about becoming a great player, and it’s been a pleasure to be out there on the grass with him.”

When Johnson played quarterback at Lee High School in Baytown, Texas, Hurts’ father, Averion Hurts, served as an assistant coach for the Ganders.

As the quarterbacks coach for Mississippi State, Johnson recruited Hurts as he played for his father, now the head coach at Channelview High School in Texas. Hurts chose to attend Alabama instead and won the SEC Offensive Player of the Year Award as a freshman in 2016. Hurts threw for 347 yards and four touchdowns and ran for 100 yards and one TD in Alabama’s 51-3 victory over Mississippi State that season.

“His dad was one of our coaches in high school, so I’ve known his dad probably since I was 15 years old,” Johnson said. “I have memories of Jalen running around the fieldhouse when I was a high school player. We’d come back during the summer for workouts during my time in college, and his dad was running the weight program at our high school, so both Jalen and his brother would be in the fieldhouse.

“Once I got into coaching at Utah, I would visit and go recruit his dad’s school once he became a head coach throughout the years that I was a college assistant going on the road recruiting. We obviously built a great relationship, and I remember at Mississippi State, we recruited him really hard and tried to get him to sign there, and he ended up going to Alabama and having a great college career.”

Hurts joined the Eagles in the second round of the 2020 NFL Draft. He started at quarterback in the final four games of his rookie season.

After the season, Philadelphia fired coach Doug Pederson and traded five-year starting QB Carson Wentz to the Indianapolis Colts.

The Eagles hired Colts offensive coordinator Nick Sirianni as their head coach. Johnson joined Sirianni’s staff from Florida, where he’d worked as the offensive coordinator.

Philadelphia has completed its offseason practices, holding a modified schedule that did not include mandatory minicamp or any 7-on-7 or 11-on-11 drills. The players report for training camp on July 27.

“I’ve been extremely pleased with how he’s handled the install – both he and Joe – in terms of learning the offense and coming in fully prepared and putting us in position to hit the ground running once we get to training camp,” Johnson said of Hurts’ offseason performance.

“Joe” is Joe Flacco, a 13-year veteran and former Super Bowl MVP who joined Philadelphia’s quarterbacks room as a free-agent signing in March.

“Joe’s been great,” Johnson said. “I’ve obviously watched him for a really long time. He has a ton of experience, and I always say: Experience is life’s best teacher. He has a lot of intellectual property that he’s been willing to share with our room, and it’s been great for our room just to hear from some of his shared experiences throughout his career in the league.”

Although Hurts finished 2020 as Philadelphia’s No. 1 QB, Sirianni has not confirmed him for that position in 2021. But the new coach said Hurts had impressed him during the offseason program.

“He is a relentless worker,” Sirianni said. “He comes to work every single day with the intent to get better every single day. And I just saw, even from Zoom meetings when we got in, I just saw him really just take command of the offense and was just on it. You ask him a question, he’s on it. It’s really translated into walk-throughs on the field and in drill work.

“So really impressed with his command, his attention to detail, his work ethic. He’s got all those intangibles right there, and I was really impressed with that from him. And then just on the field, he’s just got a really compact throwing motion where he can get it out with ease, and super athletic when he’s throwing on the run and moving and reading the defense. So really pleased with a lot of things he did.”

Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter at @AMarkG1.

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Where Does Eagles’ QB Jalen Hurts Stand After Abbreviated OTAs?

The biggest metric that will determine the Philadelphia Eagles’ fate this coming season under first-year coach Nick Sirianni is the play of quarterback Jalen Hurts, who is presumably competing against Joe Flacco for the starting job but in reality is the man who will have the football in his hands on every offensive play.

Can he pick up a new offense while improving his accuracy from his rookie season the year before? Can he ultimately produce enough points to win in today’s high-scoring NFL in which defenses no longer necessarily dominate?

The Eagles featured one of the league’s most anemic attacks last season. They were the only team besides the New York Jets, who also replaced their head coach in January, to fall short of 30 points in every game.

And while the players responded positively to Hurts being handed the reins following Carson Wentz’s benching for the final four games of last season, the bottom line was that the Eagles still couldn’t produce points, especially after opponents adjusted at halftime.

Working against Hurts this year is that even though NFL teams are allowed to conduct in-person offseason programs with a full menu of organized team activities and mandatory minicamps, which were scrapped by the coronavirus pandemic last year, the Eagles chose to hold a modified offseason program with no mandatory camp and no scrimmage situations, then turned them loose for the rest of the offseason last week, around 15 days earlier than usual.

So to recap: They have a second-year quarterback learning his second system in as many years who has yet to take a snap as a starter in a scrimmage situation heading to training camp under a new head coach, new offensive coordinator (Shane Steichen) and new quarterbacks coach (Brian Johnson). All this for a team that has set itself up with more than enough NFL Draft capital to easily be able to start over at quarterback again next season if it doesn’t like what it sees in 2021.

So where exactly do Hurts and fellow quarterback Joe Flacco, who is entering his 14th year but is a newcomer to the Eagles, stand?

“Well, I think the big thing, obviously, because you don’t go against a lot of defense, you do get a chance to see some routes on air and really, from a mental standpoint, what’s their capacity for learning,” Johnson said. “And guys have done a great job of learning the system and coming in and really studying on their own and asking the right questions and being prepared and understanding what we’re trying to accomplish as an offense.”

Johnson insists that the quarterbacks “have done a nice job of learning a new system and coming in and being prepared each and every day.”

Video: Eagles' Jalen Hurts Opens Up About Connection To Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation (CBS Philadelphia)

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The question is whether they have done enough with such limited practice time. In particular, was Hurts able to get the kind of work in that he needs to improve his accuracy?

Nobody can say for sure, but Johnson is optimistic.

“I think the biggest thing in terms of accuracy is obviously developing your feet and your eyes and making sure that everything’s in concert with your target and having just a great understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish as an offense,” he said. “I’ve been extremely pleased with how he’s handled the installs, both he and Joe, in terms of learning the offense and coming in fully prepared and putting us in a position to hit the ground running once we get to training camp.”

The oddest part about evaluating Hurts is that he is considered by everyone to possess all the leadership intangibles required of the position. The questions remaining about him are purely technical.

With most other young quarterbacks, it’s the other way around.

Like most other quarterbacks, Hurts has a personal coach he works with when he’s away from the complex. Sometimes what these coaches teach are not in line with what the team wants.

Sirianni can’t be concerned about that at this point, indicating last week that if there’s conflict, they’ll jump off that bridge when they come to it.

“Love when they work with guys and they come back with new thoughts,” Sirianni said. “But when we come back together, we’ll see if we all agree on those new thoughts again. So when they’re working and working hard, that’s what it’s about. The biggest thing is that they’re working and working hard at their craft.”

To that end, Sirianni has been nothing but complimentary of Hurts.

“Really impressed with his command, his attention to detail, his work ethic,” he said. “He’s got all those intangibles right there, and I was really impressed with that from him. And then just on the field, he’s got a really compact throwing motion where he can get it out with ease and super athletic when he’s throwing on the run and moving and reading the defense.”

Nevertheless, the Eagles and Hurts have left themselves with plenty of extra chores to be accomplished during training camp, where all eyes will be on the player who will be calling the signals and have the ball in his hands on every play.