Given three days to process Philadelphia's latest defeat, quarterback Jalen Hurts provided a small step forward in clarifying his comments following the Eagles' Monday night loss to the Seahawks.
When he called for better commitment and execution in his postgame remarks, it could have been interpreted as him asking his teammates for more. In reality, he was looking at himself in the mirror. And he realized he needs to be better.
"What I'm saying is everything starts with me. I set the tone. I'm the temperature," Hurts explained to reporters on Thursday. "I set the temperature for the room, I set all of that. I'm challenging myself to be better in all aspects. I know the standard I hold myself to. I put that standard out there.
"The reality is everyone else is held to that standard, too. The only ones that matters is my teammates. The only one that matters is my coaches. ... Just challenging myself to be everything I need to be for this team. It takes true togetherness to win, and winning is hard to do. You've got to accept the challenges of what comes with that."
Hurts is embracing the challenge ahead for his Eagles, a team that at 10-4 is still in the thick of the race for not only the NFC East, but the conference's top seed. Philadelphia picked a bad time to start struggling, but not all is lost. Dates with the Giants sandwich a meeting with the Cardinals, three games the Eagles will be expected to win to close out the regular season.
There's no better time than now to tune things up in preparation for the playoffs. And they can only guarantee a home game on Super Wild Card Weekend (or in the Divisional Round, if they climb back into the top seed) if they take care of business, a process that, as Hurts said, starts with the quarterback.
"Just pressing forward, we've got a great opportunity in front of us," Hurts said. "You can find beauty in everything. Positives in everything. ... That's why I believe this is just something that we're going through. At the end of the day we've got to go out there and play. We've got to come in here and go to work, be intentional in what we're doing. Have some consistency about ourselves, and remain focused."
The key, as Hurts said, is simple and necessary at every level of football: execution. That is the Eagles' main focus. If they fix that, they should have no reason to believe they'll see anything but success.
"It's not about anyone else, it's about how we execute," Hurts said. "It's never been about anyone else, it's just been about how we're executing. That's the reality of it. Finding ways to do that, finding ways to be efficient in different ways and all of that that's what it comes down to. That starts with me."
Hurts' journey toward a clean, error-free future begins with a home game against New York on Christmas Day. Eagles fans are hoping his leadership bears fruit, even as winter sets in along the Delaware River.
