The Philadelphia Eagles just received the worst possible update heading into Week 7. Quarterback Jalen Hurts is expected to miss pretty much the rest of the season after doctors found several blood clots in his lungs. Hurts is now on blood thinners, and the condition should have no long-term effects. Still, he is unlikely to play again in 2026.

Set the fandom aside for a second. Whoever you root for, this is devastating from a human standpoint. Hurts is a competitor who wants to be out there every single Sunday, and he came into this season carrying a ton of anticipation and expectation. Now we’re barely halfway through October, and it feels like I’m writing a eulogy for this Eagles team.

I don’t have to spell it out for you. You can see it, and you know it. We all bleed green, and nobody wants to admit it, but this season is not happening for Philadelphia. The quarterback is the engine of this offense, and without him the margin for error disappears.

A telling detail about who Jalen Hurts is

If this really is the end of Hurts’ season, I want to spend a moment on who this guy is. I’ve said it over and over: he is as tough and as competitive as any quarterback in the league. More than that, he is a straight-up winner.

If you had any doubt about that, NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero reported this: Jalen Hurts, after initially being diagnosed with a superficial blood clot, had doctors tell him not to sleep as a precaution. He had been awake for 36 hours when he started that game against the Jacksonville Jaguars in Week 5.

Thirty-six hours. No sleep. And he still walked out there and started a football game against Jacksonville.

That is the toughest thing I’ve heard all year. This is a quarterback I would go to war for any day of the week. You want to roll into battle with a guy like that, because you know he will never quit on you. Say whatever you want about the stat lines or the offense this year. Nobody can question his heart after reading that report.

The bigger question for the Eagles’ medical staff

Now, here is where my frustration kicks in. I’m not a doctor, and I want to be clear about that. But something about this timeline does not sit right with me.

Honestly, it feels like malpractice to me. If the medical staff knew Hurts had a superficial blood clot, how did they clear him to play? How did they let him take the field? And how did they let him fly and go through a normal game-week routine with that condition?

It sounds like they knew the clot was there. Now he has several clots, and his season is likely gone. That is a brutal turn of events for a player who did everything asked of him and then some.

I’m not saying anyone wanted this outcome. Teams and doctors make tough calls every week, and competitive players like Hurts will always push to play. But there is a reason medical staffs exist. Sometimes the job is to protect a player from his own competitive drive, and from the outside, this looks like a moment where that didn’t happen.

The Eagles owe their fans, and more importantly their quarterback, some real answers on how this was handled. Hurts showed exactly who he is by grinding through 36 sleepless hours to play for this team. The least the organization can do is show the same kind of accountability now that the season has slipped away.