It’s hard to move these days without being hit with a strident opinion about Brock Purdy.
Either he’s the second coming of Tom Brady: a late-round draft pick who fell through the cracks, knows how to win and has pushed his offense to another level. Or he’s the latest product of the Kyle Shanahan system: a so-so quarterback playing in the ideal setup with a stellar supporting class.
The truth, as usual, lands somewhere between the extremes.
Sometimes it’s worth stepping back to think about just how remarkable Purdy’s rise has been. You know the story: He was the final pick in last year’s draft. But go back further. In high school, Purdy was the 841st-ranked player in the country before committing to Iowa State. His rise from high school afterthought to good-not-great college player to quality NFL starter in this short amount of time is unlike anything we’ve seen.
Tom Brady was an excellent college quarterback who was misevaluated by the league. Likewise for Russell Wilson, who couldn’t shake pre-draft concerns about his height. The only comparison to Purdy’s career arc is with Kurt Warner, who went from bagging groceries to league MVP. But Warner was an unknown. He played at a Division II college before going on to play in Canada and bouncing between NFL practice squads and NFL Europe.
The NFL did not consider Warner in the first place. The same cannot be said for Purdy. Teams saw him and shrugged: he was a slightly undersized college player who racked up wins and school records but lacked a signature athletic trait that could transfer to the big time. That Purdy finds himself on the fringes of the MVP conversation 14 regular season games into his pro career after a ho-hum run in college is unprecedented.
And yet here we are. Sound the trumpets: Brock Purdy is 2023’s five-game MVP.
Purdy has been as close to flawless as you could hope for from a second-year starter. He is the first quarterback in the Super Bowl era to win his first five starts in each of his first two seasons. He has helped turn the Niners from a dominant team with good quarterback play into a freight train.
The gulf in talent between the Cowboys and Niners last Sunday, on both sides of the ball, was stark. And this against a Cowboys team that sits at the NFC’s top table. Or at least they did. It’s looking increasingly like the Niners have moved into a tier of their own. To paraphrase Brad Pitt in Moneyball, in the NFC, there is the Niners, a drop to the Cowboys and Eagles, 50ft of crap, and then everyone else.
Purdy, who has yet to throw an interception this season, isn’t the reason for San Francisco’s excellence. But he is a key reason. He leads the league in the dorkiest of advanced metrics. Take your pick from an array of disorienting acronyms (EPA; ANY/A; QBR) and you’ll find Purdy’s name at the top of the charts. Through the early stages of the season, he has been the best quarterback in the league at [deep breath] throwing in under three seconds, throwing in likely passing situations, on throws of 10 or more air yards, and on deep shots when throwing under pressure. He has the highest passer rating through five games of any quarterback since the 1940s, toppling Russell Wilson’s monopoly, and is outpacing every quarterback in the league, by some distance, in total output.
At some point, it’s time to acknowledge that Purdy is more than a cog in the Shanahan machine. If Purdy was merely a Jimmy Garoppolo-type, the plug-and-play passer he replaced in San Francisco, we would have seen it by now.
And yet there remains a reluctance to accept Purdy’s role in his own success. For those who doubt him, it’s about everyone and everything surrounding Purdy. It’s because of the coaching staff. Or Christian McCaffrey. Or the rest of the Niners’ playmakers. Or the offensive line. Basically, anyone not named Brock Purdy.
True, Purdy has been – and continues to be – put in advantageous spots. The Niners run among the most quarterback-friendly schemes in the league. In McCaffrey, George Kittle, Brandon Aiyuk, Deebo Samuel and Kyle Juszczyk, they have a five-man death lineup that no defense in the league is built to match. But isn’t the whole point of coaching and team-building meant to be that you put players in the best position to succeed?
Perhaps the reluctance to embrace Purdy as a franchise-caliber starter is more about aesthetics than anything else. His game is built more in the style of Tua Tagovailoa (who deals with similar criticism) than the rest of the NFL’s top quarterbacks. He doesn’t have Josh Allen’s arm. He doesn’t have the wheels of Lamar Jackson. He doesn’t conjure the impossible like Patrick Mahomes. Purdy doesn’t have an obvious, leap-off-the-screen, defining skill. Instead, his game revolves around the basics: accuracy, timing and decision-making, skills that do not always flash but that fuel winning.
Purdy’s staunchest defenders stand in his own huddle. “I feel like I’m with a lethal killer in the huddle,” Kittle said this week. Kittle understands that Purdy has helped unlock a new dimension of the Niners’ offense, with assists from McCaffrey and Aiyuk. He is more aggressive, decisive and accurate than Garoppolo.
Unlike Garoppolo, Purdy is a playmaker. He creates more outside the comfy confines of Shanahan’s offense than any quarterback the coach has worked with since Robert Griffin III. All four of Purdy’s touchdown throws against the Cowboys came from outside the pocket, per NFL Next Gen Stats, the most in a single game in the NGS era.
Would Purdy have worked out without Shanahan? Would he play this well anywhere else? Who knows? Does it matter?
Circumstances dictate the success or failure of the majority of draft picks. Would David Carr have done better if he hadn’t been drafted No 1 overall by a flawed Houston Texans team? Would another coach have carried Brady as the fourth quarterback on their roster to get him more practice reps as a rookie? What if Aaron Rodgers had not been given three years to overhaul his mechanics in Green Bay? Would Warner have been anything more than a practice squad arm if he hadn’t wound up with the Rams and the Greatest Show on Turf?
Being the final pick in the draft will always hover over Purdy. There is an innate bias in those who do not want to confess to ‘missing it’ on a high-level quarterback.
The reality is the whole league missed on Purdy, including the Niners. If they had known he’d been this good, this quickly, they’d have selected him in the first round themselves. Maybe they would have dealt three first-rounders to snag him before anyone else. In ejecting on the Trey Lance experience and ditching Garoppolo, the Niners let us know that they didn’t view Purdy’s rookie season as a fluke.
He may not be as individually valuable as Mahomes, Allen or Jackson. He will never be as physically talented. But Purdy is the ideal quarterback for the Niners at the ideal time. And when you’re chasing a Lombardi, it doesn’t get more valuable than that.
