“What does not kill me makes me stronger.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts competed in the Super Bowl on February 12, after just two years in the NFL. Drafted in 2020, he’s unquestionably a breakout talent. It would be easy to think that he’s led a charmed life with very few obstacles on his path to superstardom.
But you’d be wrong. Hurts’s success in the NFL comes after a very public humiliation during his college career.
Hurts was a starter for Alabama, one of the best teams in the SEC. Head coach Nick Saban benched Hurts at halftime of the 2018 College Football Playoff championship game versus Georgia in favor of quarterback Tua Tagovailoa. Hurts was playing injured with a high ankle sprain, and his performance suffered. (Tagovailoa went on to lead the team to victory.)
Saban admires Hurts for his character on and off the field. After the benching, he showed up for training and practice just as he had every day of the season, Saban says. The following season Hurts was Tagovailoa’s backup despite having a 26-2 record as a starter at Alabama. Hurts continued to be gracious about the situation, but he finally decided to leave Alabama rather than serve another season as a backup.
He transferred to Oklahoma, where he had a successful season under another great coach. The Philadelphia Eagles selected Hurts 53rd overall in the second round of the 2020 NFL Draft. He was originally being named the third-string quarterback behind Nate Sudfeld and starter Carson Wentz. But in December 2020, Hurts was brought in to replace Wentz, who was benched for ineffective play. Hurst had come full circle.
Two years later, the Eagles were 14-1 and Hurts was a finalist for the league MVP.
Resilience in the face of adversity is one of the characteristics we see often in the student athletes we recruit for businesses. Most of them learn important lessons through their sports careers, including how to get back up when they’ve been knocked down. They also learn that it’s never over until it’s over.
Toughness and grit are built through adversity, through surviving the worst things that happen to us. Sometimes, what feels like the worst thing that could have happened turns out to be what makes you better. NBA legend Michael Jordan was sent down to his school’s junior varsity team because his coach considered his “shooting to be merely good and his defense mediocre.” At 5’10” at 15 year old, he was also not big enough to meet the needs of the size-starved varsity team.
Michael Jordan has famously said he went home and cried after he learned he’d not made the varsity team. Then he practiced. He got better. And he made history.
There are hundreds of stories of athletes and others who took the worst thing that happened to them not as the end of the road, but as the beginning of a different, and maybe better, journey. We seek them out because those lessons transfer over to their business careers as well.