The biggest challenge ranking Eagles quarterbacks is what to do with Nick Foles.
He only won 25 games in his entire Eagles career – including the postseason. He never started more than 10 games in a season. He made just one opening-day start and only lasted eight games.
But he had a historic record-setting Pro Bowl 2013 season under Chip Kelly and returned to Philly in 2017 to back up Carson Wentz and wound up as the Super Bowl MVP after leading the Eagles on an unforgettable improbable miracle run in 2017.
Stay in the game with the latest updates on your beloved Philadelphia sports teams! Sign up here for our All Access Daily newsletter.
Does the Super Bowl make him No. 1? If not, how far does the fleeting nature of his Eagles career drop him?
The Eagles have a strange history with quarterbacks.
Only three QBs in franchise history have won more than 35 games. Only five have won more than one playoff game. Only two since 1960 have made more than one Pro Bowl.
With that in mind, here’s how we ranked the top 10 quarterbacks in Eagles history:
NFL
10. Sonny Jurgensen: His best years came with Washington, but his best year came in 1961 – his first year as an Eagles starter after backing up Norm Van Brocklin on the 1960 Championship team. Jurgensen led the NFL with 3,723 passing yards and 32 touchdowns in 14 games. Those 32 TDs stood as a franchise record for 57 years - until Carson Wentz had 33 in 2017. Jurgensen remains the last Eagles QB named 1st-team all-pro. But overall, Jurgensen was just 17-20-2 as Eagles QB. After his all-pro 1961 season, he won four of 21 starts with the Eagles before landing in Washington.
9. Norm Van Brocklin: Another tricky one because Van Brocklin only spent three years in Philly after he was a six-time Pro Bowler with the Rams. He was just 19-16-1 with the Eagles, but in 1960 – his final season in the NFL – he led the Eagles to a 10-2 record, threw 24 TD passes and passed for 204 yards and a TD in the Eagles’ 1960 NFL Championship Game win over the Packers at Franklin Field, the only postseason loss ever for Vince Lombardi or Bart Starr.
8. Michael Vick: Vick deserves credit for his incredible 2010 season, when he resurrected his career and his life, went 8-3 after replacing Kevin Kolb, made the Pro Bowl and led the Eagles to the playoffs after not playing in 2007 and 2008 and barely playing in 2009. But after starting the 2010 season 8-2, he went 12-18 the rest of his Eagles career. He brought a lot of excitement to the Linc in 2010 but couldn’t sustain it. And that pass he tried to thread to rookie Riley Cooper that Tramon Williams picked off in the end zone in the fourth quarter with a playoff game against the Packers on the line … that’s one of the worst passes in Eagles history.
7. Tommy Thompson: In 1948, Thompson had a historic season, with an NFL-high 25 TD passes in 12 games. Incredibly, 75 years later, that’s still 9th-most in Eagles history, and his 98.4 passer rating that year stood as the franchise record until Donovan McNabb broke it in 2004. Thompson, who missed 1943 and 1944 while serving in the Army, was the QB when the Eagles won two NFL Championships. Now, he only completed seven passes total for 75 yards in those two NFL Championship Games, but as you may have heard the weather was awful for both of them. We don’t have an exact win total for Thompson – they didn’t start tracking QB wins until 1950 – but despite playing in the early days of the NFL, Thompson still deserves a spot on our top 10.
6. Carson Wentz: What the heck do you do with Carson? You want him off the list? Wentz is somehow fourth in franchise history in passing yards and touchdowns, second in completion percentage and even fourth in wins. And he did go 11-2 before getting hurt in 2017 and without those 11 wins the Eagles aren’t the No. 1 seed and the Super Bowl never happens. But with a 24-30 record in his four other seasons here and no playoff wins and three career playoff passing yards, this seems like a good spot for him. It says more about Eagles quarterback history than Wentz himself that he’s No. 6 on the list.
5. Jalen Hurts: Hurts has only been a full-time starter for two years, but he has to be in the top five based on a 22-8 record since becoming the full-time starter in 2021, a near-MVP season and historic Super Bowl performance last year and a boatload of records that he set before his 25th birthday. He’s already one of only six QBs in Eagles history to take more than one team to the playoffs and he’s only going to get better. Sure feels like he’s a lock to be ranked higher if we do this again in a few years.
4. Ron Jaworski: Jaws arrived here from the Rams in 1977 and was a big part of the franchise’s revival after nearly two decades at the bottom of the NFL. From 1978 through 1981, Jaws went 42-22, and only Terry Bradshaw (43) had more wins league-wide. Jaws led the Eagles to the postseason all four years – they hadn’t been there since 1960 – and to the Super Bowl in 1980. His four playoff wins are tied for 2nd-most in Eagles history. And Jaws’ 116 consecutive starts from 1977 through 1984 (123 including playoffs) were an NFL record for nearly 20 years.
3. Randall Cunningham: He didn’t really get things totally figured out until he worked with Brian Billick in Minnesota, but from 1987 through 1992, Cunningham was as exciting as any player the NFL had ever seen. He went 49-27 during that span, made three straight Pro Bowls, took the Eagles to the playoffs four times and won his only playoff game in an Eagles uniform in New Orleans in 1992. Despite missing all but one quarter of 1991, Cunningham had the 7th-most passing yards in the NFL from 1987 through 1992, the 6th-most TD passes and had the 9th-highest passer rating and only Jim Kelly, Dan Marino and John Elway won more games. And he ran for over 3,000 yards during that span. Randall had six seasons with the Eagles where he started more than four games and never had a losing record. Only McNabb had more 10-win seasons in Eagles history than Randall, and only McNabb took more teams to the postseason. He'll be the first to tell you he could have been better, but he was still pretty darn great.
2. Nick Foles: You can make a case for Foles at No. 1. He’s the only quarterback in Eagles history to win a Super Bowl. His 27-TD, 2-INT season in 2013 set an NFL record. Philly Special. Super Bowl MVP. Seven-TD game in Oakland. All of it. He’s got the highest passer rating in franchise history, although Hurts isn’t far behind (93.2 to 92.2), and from 2013 on, he was 24-7 in 31 regular season and postseason starts as an Eagle. His 115.7 passer rating in the 2017 postseason is 4th-highest ever (minimum 100 attempts). Foles vs. McNabb comes down to a short but remarkable body of work vs. a long and consistently very good body of work. It’s gotta be 5.
1. Donovan McNabb: From 2000 through 2009, McNabb’s 10 years as the Eagles’ opening-day starter, he had the 4th-most wins in the NFL (behind future Hall of Famers Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and Favre], the 3rd-most passing yards, 4th-most TD passes and 2nd-most playoff wins with nine, behind Brady’s 14. To this day, McNabb’s nine playoff wins are 13th-most in NFL history. And from 2000 through 2004, nobody won more games than McNabb. Jaws helped restore order to the franchise. Randall played the game like nobody else ever had. Foles took the franchise to heights we’d never seen. But nobody did it better and for longer than McNabb.