A lot has been made this past week of Jalen Hurts’ ability to throw the deep ball with questions on both his arm strength and accuracy. He had a couple of deep passes to DeVonta Smith in the SF game that were not good, throwing late/ underthrowing DeVonta on two of them.
But when looking at Jalen’s passing stats, he has actually been very good at deep passes on almost any metric you want to look at. His NFL stats below need a huge, obligatory caveat that Hurts’ numbers fall into the “small sample size” category with just over 200 total passing attempts, but he was good with deep passing in college as well.
Deep passing stats for NFL QBs
Below are passing stats from 2017-2021 for NFL QBs. I filtered to QBs with at least 400 attempts but also included the recent rookie QBs from the past several years. Passing depth is defined by air yards – a 5 yard pass with a 50 yard YAC run will count as a 5 yard pass so that this measures accuracy and value based on the depth of target. Deep passes as defined as 25 air yards or more.
Hurts shows up extremely well in any metric you want to use:
- 9.8% of his passing attempts were 25 yards or more, which ranks 7th of 58 QBs
- His 40.0% completion percentage over 25 air yards ranks 5th
- His 0.916 Expected Points Added (EPA) per deep passing attempt ranks 1st overall by a good margin.
- His 8.18 Completion Percentage Over Expected (CPOE), a measure that factors in the difficulty of the throw (air yards, WR separation, distance to nearest pass rusher), and expected completion percentage, ranks 5th overall.
His misses are very visible to us as we watch all of his throws, but his 40% completion percentage is only 5% less than the best. Russell Wilson, known as one of the best deep passers in the league, has a 42.3% deep pass completion percentage, only 2.3% better than Hurts, and nearly equivalent CPOE numbers. To prove Wilson has poorly thrown deep balls, here is one form week 1 against Indy.
Not saying Wilson isn’t good or that Hurts is at his level as Wilson has put these numbers up over many years. But the above pass into double coverage that wasn’t even close happens to all QBs – as Eagles fans, we just notice Hurts’ and can recite every one after games.
Hurts’ college deep passing stats
Hurts’ professional stats are still such a small sample and he could end up regressing (and he will, especially his deep passing EPA which is crazy high right now). But his deep ball stats in college show that his pro stats didn’t come out of nowhere.
| Year | Comp / Att | Completion % | TD / Int | Passer Rating | PFF Grade |
| Senior – 2019 | 33 / 66 | 50.0% | 10 / 3 | 116.5 | 95.4 |
| Junior – 2018 | 8 / 11 | 72.7% | 2 / 1 | 116.5 | 98.0 |
| Sophomore – 2017 | 12 / 38 | 31.6% | 4 / 0 | 115.6 | 91.8 |
| Freshman – 2016 | 21 / 60 | 35.0% | 4 / 2 | 82.6 | 91.7 |
It’s obviously really early in Hurts’ career and it is likely Hurts regresses on the above stats, but the narratives you often see written are sometimes just not supported by data. Last year Hurts had the highest aDOT in the league and there was more conversation on him needing to run a more efficient offense. In week 1, against a defense that schemed taking away deeper passes, Hurts did exactly what was needed, running a very efficient offense. But then his league low aDOT was the point of conversation. Against SF, he went 3 / 8 on deep passes with one of the incompletions being the overturned TD where Reagor stepped out.
I explained in an earlier post here what Hurts needs to improve on which are (1) quicker releases / better timing of throws and (2) limiting turnovers. It isn’t accuracy and it isn’t deep balls / explosive plays.