If Nick Wright could sever the memories created during Super Bowl week in New Orleans, perhaps the FS1 star would give Ben Stiller a ring. After being mercilessly trolled by his colleagues following his beloved Kansas City Chiefs getting crushed by the Philadelphia Eagles 40-22 in Super Bowl LIX, Wright seemingly had a week to forget in The Big Easy.
But there’s more to it than just the Super Bowl loss.
On Tuesday’s First Things First, the 40-year-old recounted how he was having a good time at the Klutch Sports party on Saturday evening. After having a few drinks, an unknown woman approached Wright and informed him she had a question to ask him.
“Why do you talk so bad about Jalen Hurts?”
“I was like, ‘Well, I don’t think I talk bad,’ … and she was not budging a bit,” Wright said, as covered by the New York Post. “She’s like, ‘No, no, you do.’ And I said, well, let me tell you the good things I said about him. Once this goes on for five, six, seven minutes, I had a moment of clarity, and I said, ‘Ma’am, can I ask you one question real quick?’ I said, ‘Are you Jalen Hurts’ mother?”
Indeed, she was.
To be fair to Wright, he hasn’t gone on network television and declared Hurts to be a “liability,” like his foe Dan Orlovsky did (the ex-Detroit Lions quarterback later apologized). However, Wright claimed before the start of the 2024 NFL season that the eventual Super Bowl MVP’s 2022 season was likely an aberration and that he wouldn’t be able to replicate that type of success.
He also claimed that Hurts was being “too cautious” in Training Camp.
“Right now, if I had to make a bet, I would bet 2022 was an aberration,” Wright said via Athlon Sports. “I don’t expect Jalen Hurts to be able to do that again.”
He did, which is why Hurts’ mother, Pamela, had a bone to pick with the unabashed Wright, who’s a bit shameless about his Chiefs.
And Mrs. Hurts let him have it.
“It went on for another 15 minutes, where it was a very cordial but intense mother defending her child against someone who she thinks has been unfair to him,” Wright recalled. “She ended it with this, ‘I just want to know what you’re going to say when he wins [on Sunday].'”
Because Wright is Wright, he said if Hurts wins.
But it was more like when because Wright still felt good about Kansas City’s chances up until Cooper DeJean’s first-half pick six.
He had to see how Hurts, who completed 77.3 of his passes for 221 yards with two touchdowns against three interceptions, adding 72 yards on the ground and another touchdown, fared on Sunday. And after Hurts put together one of the best performances of his career, Wright was there, ready to eat crow.
“So to Mrs. Hurts and to anyone else, he was phenomenal,” Wright said. “The Chiefs did do the thing that I think anyone who was confident the Chiefs would in thought — stop Saquon [Barkley], and you win. That’s the one thing they did effectively, game planning-wise, and it didn’t work because Jalen made every play that was asked of him.
“It’s the second Super Bowl he’s played in — great in both. It’s the fourth Conference Championship or Super Bowl he’s played in — he’s been great in three of them. And the one he wasn’t great, he didn’t have to be. It was the one [Brock] Purdy got knocked out of… And so, he is as impressive as a leader as just about anyone in the sport, and the team he leads just had, in my opinion, a top-five all-time Super Bowl performance by a team as far as what they did on both sides of the ball.”
Hopefully, what Wright had to offer about Jalen being a top-five player in his position was good enough for Mrs. Hurts.
“I think it is unfair to say that Joe [Burrow] or Lamar [Jackson] or Josh [Allen] are just definitively clearly in a different class than Jalen; I think he’s gotta be in that top five,” he said.
