During Friday afternoon’s game against the Chicago Bears, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts will wear cleats designed by three Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia patients.
The former Alabama standout visited the hospital to work out the shoe design with the youngsters, who will be his guests at Lincoln Financial Field for the NFL game.
“There’s a lot that comes with being a franchise quarterback,” Hurts told the Eagles’ website, “and one of the biggest perks is to be able to serve others, to be able to show up and inspire. I think in the midst of inspiring others, those kids don’t realize how much they inspire me, how much they encourage me. …
“They look at me like I’m a superhero, like I wear a cape and score touchdowns and make plays, and I rock the number 1, but they’re really the superheroes because they’re going through things that I couldn’t imagine. You talk about perseverance, you talk about resilience, the words perseverance, resilience, grit, endurance, I can’t compete with any of that through my own testimony.”
The children called the shoes they designed “Victory Sharks,” and victory will be foremost on Hurts’ mind on Friday.
“Nothing takes precedent over finding ways to win,” Hurts said on Tuesday.
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The quarterback acknowledged that’s a change in his thinking from his “the standard is the standard” days, when playing to a level of excellence was the first order of business.
“I think it has evolved,” Hurts said, “and I think you can only expect a mentality to evolve over time. I’m not going to say the mentality is supposed to change or stay the same. I’m saying that people change throughout the course of time based upon their experiences. And so when you’re talking about the ’22 season, the standard is always the standard. And this kind of brings me back to the notion I spoke on in, since we’re going down memory lane, 2023, where I talked about 1A and 1B, and, look, you have a standard of excellence that you pursue, and you want to go perform at a high level. In the end, the collective, the thing that’s bigger than all of us, is finding a way to win. And so that’s something that everyone benefits from and that’s why we’re all here.
“And so I think as a team and I think as an organization, we’ve experienced high levels of success, and you could say we’ve had some great performances and great showings and we hadn’t found a way to win the game. So in the end, I’m not going to think about how I performed first. I’ll think about whether we won or we lost. Then I’ll get to that and try and assess and see how I can improve and continue to pursue excellence in performance. But, you know, nothing takes precedent over winning.”
The Eagles did not find a way to win their most recent game. After Hurts threw a touchdown pass and ran for two scores on Philadelphia’s first three possessions, the Eagles did not score again and the Dallas Cowboys overcame a 21-point deficit for a 24-21 victory on Sunday.
“I look at that last game, and it’s a game where there were a lot of things that we could control that we didn’t,” Hurts said. “And it needs to be eliminated. And there’s a push to do so. Just got to keep pushing. Got to keep pushing.”
Coming off a Super Bowl-winning season, Philadelphia won its first four games of 2025, then lost to the Denver Broncos and New York Giants. Four more victories followed before the loss to Dallas.
Do the Eagles complete the pattern repeat with a loss to the Bears?
“It’s a team message of how you respond,” Hurts said. “Your response is very important in anything you do. And so it’s a question of how bad you want something, what you’re willing to do to get it. Continue to come together to achieve the collective.”
While Philadelphia is seeking its third Super Bowl appearance in four years, a victory by Chicago on Friday would assure the Bears of their first winning season since 2018.
At 8-3, Chicago has the same record as the Eagles. The Bears lead the NFL with 24 takeaways in 2025. Philadelphia has the league’s fewest turnovers with six.
“You know going into it it’s good on good,” Hurts said. “Great defense, great mentality, great culture, it seems, and you see them flying around, so it’s more about what you do -- your fundamentals, your details and really honing in on those things in a short week. So that’s a great challenge for us.”
The Bears and Eagles square off at 2 p.m. CST Friday in a meeting of division leaders. Prime Video will televise the game that matches the NFC North and the NFC East leaders.