PHILADELPHIA — A few weeks ago, Tanner McKee was the third quarterback on this roster. The guy who holds a clipboard, runs the scout team, and waits for a late-December game that doesn’t count. This afternoon at the Linc, he is the whole season.
That’s how fast it turns in this league. Jalen Hurts is out with a blood clot in his calf — a scary thing that puts a football game in its proper, small place — and so a sixth-round pick from the 2023 draft walks into a 2-3 huddle and is asked to save it. No pressure, kid. Just a region that has been waiting since training camp for this offense to look like itself, a defense that can’t keep bailing everybody out, and a fan base in Camden and Cherry Hill and Washington Township that treats three losses in October like a civic emergency.
What the tape says
Here’s what I’ll tell you about Tanner McKee, and I’ll tell you straight: the tape is better than the depth chart suggested. In parts of four career games he has thrown five touchdowns against a single interception, completed 61 percent of his passes, and posted a 95.7 passer rating. He beat the Giants on the final day of the 2024 season. Those aren’t nothing. Those are the reasons the Eagles moved him ahead of Andy Dalton on the depth chart and then released Dalton on Oct. 9.
But let’s not insult anybody. Beating a Giants team playing out the string is not the same as walking into a prime stretch of your schedule with your franchise quarterback sidelined and a locker room reading your eyes. This is McKee’s first start that actually means something, and he knows it. His preparation, he said this week, is going to be the same, which is the thing every backup says and the thing almost none of them live up to. He also said his first reaction to Hurts’ injury wasn’t about his own opportunity — it was worry for the man he calls a mentor and “an unbelievable teammate.” Good. That’s the right order of things. Remember that the next time somebody tells you these guys don’t care about anything but the next contract.
What he can’t give you
What should you expect? A cleaner pocket presence than you’re used to, for one. McKee is tall, he’s patient, and he throws with anticipation — he’ll put the ball where Hurts sometimes waits a beat too long to. What he can’t give you is the thing that has carried this team for years: Hurts on a quarterback sneak from the one, Hurts pulling it down and getting you seven hard yards on third-and-five, Hurts turning a broken play into a first down with his legs. The Eagles have built an identity around a quarterback who is also a battering ram. McKee is not that. So this offense has to become something it hasn’t had to be in a while — a group that wins with timing, with a banged-up backfield carrying the load, with the offensive line simply manhandling people. If this front can’t move Carolina off the ball for one Sunday, that’s on the veterans, not the new kid.
And understand the margin here. At 2-3, there is no such thing as a moral victory left on the table. Behind McKee now is an untested group led by rookie fifth-rounder Cole Payton, which means the Eagles are one more bad afternoon from a genuine crisis at the most important position in sports. That is a sentence I did not expect to write about a team that won the Super Bowl in February 2025.
Prove them wrong, kid. We’ve got a soft spot for exactly that.Samuel Banks
No margin left
But I’ve watched this region long enough to know how it works. South Jersey loves a long shot more than it loves a favorite. We are a place that roots for the guy who got overlooked, drafted late, told to wait his turn. That’s half of everybody I grew up with in Camden. Tanner McKee is, this afternoon, the most relatable man in a Philadelphia uniform — the one they almost didn’t keep, handed the keys to the thing we love most.
Prove them wrong, kid. We’ve got a soft spot for exactly that.
Based on reporting from NBC Sports Philadelphia, ESPN, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.