Do you think you’re a different kind of leader than they’ve had here recently?Ī: Yeah. Q: Lincoln (Riley) said you’re different than a lot of guys in that it’s way more important to you. The last two guys have done great things here, but they had time to digest things, learn the system and get acclimated to everything. Q: Where do you think you’ve improved most since the beginning of the year?Ī: I don’t think people realize how challenging this is for me in terms of learning a new offense and not having a predecessor in front of me and getting to watch them. On a couple of occasions, he answered questions that I didn’t specifically ask, either because he wanted to expound on something to get it out there or because in his mind he was taking me somewhere I didn’t fully grasp. In those one-on-one interviews, he came across as thoughtful and deep. There was a lot there, even if he only let you get a peek at what was on his mind sometimes.Īlmost everyone, I think, assumed he had the biggest chip on his shoulder because of the way things played out at Alabama and how it happened on such a big stage with more than 22 million people watching. I found him to be one of the most compelling athletes I’ve ever been around. My TV crew at Fox Sports had several Oklahoma games that season, and I spoke with Hurts a few times during the week. He followed back-to-back Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks, Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray, at OU, and just like his two predecessors, he sparked the Sooners to the top-ranked offense in the country and a College Football Playoff spot. “When I heard that, it helped open it up for me,” he said.Īfter the next season, Hurts transferred from Alabama to Oklahoma. Hurts said he’d gone to a leadership summit at IMG the year before, and one of the big takeaways from it was for a person to be able to lead, they have to be able to love. It’s that coaching cliché that often gets trampled by our own human nature. I realized this all gets to why Hurts remembers to always keep the main thing the main thing, even as he leads the Eagles to Super Bowl LVII in his third NFL season. “Nothing is ever about me,” Hurts explained a few months later to a group of high school quarterbacks at the Elite 11 camp. But doing so is much easier said than done. This was the son of a coach, the kid who always seemed to be the wisest one on the team, displaying everything that had been instilled in him. And I’m so happy for him and so happy for this team.” “I knew he was gonna step in and do his thing,” Hurts said through a big smile, before adding that Tagovailoa is “built for stuff like this. When ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi interviewed him amid the on-field celebration, he asked Hurts for his honest reaction to learning that he was being removed from the game for Tagovailoa.
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