Since Jalen Hurts became Philadelphia’s starting quarterback, the Eagles have a 4-0 record in the game after their bye week – and a 4-0 record in their second game after their bye week.
“That’s one thing that you don’t think about as a competitor,” Hurts said. “You look back on it, I guess. You know, you live life forward, but you learn it backwards or you reflect on these things after it happens.
“And that’s one thing that I’ve never, ever thought about. But I think that’s just a testimony to the singular focus going into every game, you know, and I kind of relate it to the changes and I guess the continuity or lack thereof in certain times where you’re going through these things, and it just seems like the bye week is a time where we can take a break and decompress a little bit, come together and say, ‘Hey, OK, what do we want to do? How do we want to do it?’ And so again, this bye week came in the middle of the year, and we’ll see what that does for us.”
Philadelphia entered its bye week with a 6-2 record and comes out of the open date against the Green Bay Packers in the midpoint contest of the Eagles’ 17-game regular-season schedule on Monday night.
“It’s good to be back,” Hurts said at his Thursday press conference. “Just from a macro perspective, you always take a step back and try and assess where you are. As a team, everybody does that from their role. Obviously, mine being from the quarterback position, assessing where we are as a team and assessing where we are as an offense and assessing where I am in my play and how I can be better and then how we can all improve and all those aspects. And then you trust the coaches to come forth with a plan to allow us to continue to excel and grow, and kind of come back and you galvanize all those things together so we can try and go out there and continue to build.
“So the process, you kind of self-subscribe the rest, but the work is always mandated.”
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The Eagles and Packers will square off at 7:15 p.m. CST Monday at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. ABC and ESPN will televise the game.
Philadelphia will play on the Packers’ historic home field for the first time since Dec. 6, 2020. On that date, with his team carrying a 3-7-1 record and trailing Green Bay 14-3 at halftime, Eagles coach Doug Pederson pulled starting quarterback Carson Wentz to play Hurts, a second-round rookie.
Philadelphia lost 30-16, but the former Alabama QB started the four games remaining on the Eagles’ 2020 schedule. In the offseason, Philadelphia traded Wentz to the Indianapolis Colts, and Hurts is now almost halfway through his fifth season as the Eagles’ starting quarterback.
“I think it could be a little nostalgic,” Hurts said. “But, you know, I remember not winning the game when we should have won the game. Coming back, had a holding call that held us back a bit. But, hopefully, it can be different this time.”
For it to be different, the Eagles will need to overcome a team that added pass-rusher Micah Parsons to its defense since Philadelphia defeated the Packers 22-10 in the first round of the NFC playoffs last season.
“That was a really good defense last year already,” Hurts said. “And so adding Micah to the mix makes them that much more of a problem. A really good defense, great, great players up front, very disruptive up front, and then in the back end, they are very sticky in coverage. Linebackers fly around from sideline to sideline. As we know, it’s a great challenge for us.”
The forecast calls for a kickoff temperature of 27 degrees at Lambeau Field.
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