Jalyx Hunt Won’t Stop Winning — and the Eagles Open Saturday

There’s a moment in every training camp when a young player stops being a name on the depth chart and starts being a problem for the other team. Two weeks into this Eagles camp, that player is Jalyx Hunt — and the coaching staff has noticed.

The signature moment came earlier this month, when Hunt beat Lane Johnson on an inside move in one-on-ones. Let me tell you what that means, because if you didn’t grow up around this game you might scroll right past it. Lane Johnson does not lose. He’s a future Hall of Fame right tackle who has spent a decade making All-Pro pass rushers look ordinary. When a second-year edge rusher gets him on an inside counter, in front of the whole team, that is not a fluke. That is a message.

Something that feels real

Hunt has been the story of these first two weeks. The kid plays with his hair on fire, and the staff has taken to running him with the ones in situational work. Down here in South Jersey, where we’ve watched enough Eagles camps to know the difference between August hype and something real, this one feels real. You can talk yourself into a lot of things in shorts and shells. You can’t talk yourself into beating Lane Johnson.

The bigger picture is a defense trying to stay nasty without taking anything for granted — a team that knows what the window looks like with a quarterback in his prime and a roster built to win now. Every young guy who forces his way onto the field is one more reason the front office can sleep at night when a starter tweaks something in Week 6.

An injury, an audition

Speaking of tweaks — the offense is navigating the first real bump of camp. DeVonta Smith is on the shelf with a hamstring, and in his absence, Dontayvion Wicks has quietly become Jalen Hurts’ favorite target. That’s the thing about camp: an injury to one man is an audition for another, and Wicks has answered the bell. Dallas Goedert came alive with three grabs from Hurts, and even Jason Kelce turned up, spending a chunk of practice coaching up the young offensive linemen like the big brother this room still needs. Hurts, for his part, is being used the way that scares defensive coordinators — as a runner, keeping the ball on zone-reads and scrambling when the routes downfield get bottled up.

You want to know why this locker room keeps overachieving? After one practice the whole team gathered at midfield to sing Happy Birthday to their quarterback. These men actually like each other. That’s not a small thing in a sport that chews up relationships for a living.Samuel Banks

Real football, Saturday

The real football starts soon enough. The Eagles open the preseason Saturday, August 15, on the road against the Ravens at M&T Bank Stadium, before closing the exhibition slate at home against the Bengals on Friday, August 28 — a nationally televised night game at the Linc. But for now it’s camp: hot, grinding, and somewhere on that field a second-year edge rusher is convincing the best right tackle of his generation that he’s got a long year ahead of him. In every South Jersey town that lives and dies with the Birds, that’s exactly the kind of story we wait all summer to hear.

Based on reporting from Bleeding Green Nation, NBC Sports Philadelphia, PhillyVoice, and Yahoo Sports.