SANTA CLARA, Calif.—In this football fairy-tale life of Brock Purdy, you might be surprised to learn that, in the midst of a 42-10 beatdown of the Dallas Cowboys Sunday night, he made a mistake. He threw an incomplete pass slightly behind Brandon Aiyuk in the second quarter.
An hour after the game, you could tell: It ticked him off. Not in the helmet-throwing way, because that’s not Brock Purdy. But in the professional, I-let-my-team-down kind of way. With 6:22 left in the first half and the Niners up 14-7, he had Aiyuk in the middle of bracketed coverage—linebacker in front, DB in back—and he just missed it. “I had a great look at it,” Purdy told me calmly (everything he says is in a calm tenor) an hour after the game, in a room outside the Niners’ locker room. “The ’backer was dropping a little bit deeper than I expected and I was trying to fit it in there, and I just threw it behind him.
“I was like, man, you know, if we ran it again, I could just put it on a line over the ’backer for Brandon and just lead him before the safety comes. I just wanted another chance at it.”
Brilliant minds …
“That,” Kyle Shanahan told me, “was like the only play all night I can remember that Brock was off on the whole day. So I went up to him and BA [Aiyuk] at halftime. We had such a good look—it was set up so well for it to work. I said to him: ‘We’re gonna come back to that. BA, you run the same route. Hopefully we’ll get that look again. Brock’ll get you this time.’“
When Kyle Shanahan wants to run a play, he really wants to run a play. On the second snap of the second half, it was first-and-15 from the Niners’ 20-yard line, Purdy saw an in-cutting Aiyuk. But uh-oh. This time the linebacker, Leighton Vander Esch, played it even better—he was close to Aiyuk in the middle of the field, maybe 27 yards downfield from where Purdy was set up in the pocket.
“The linebacker was so deep,” Shanahan said. “I didn’t know if Brock could get it over him.”
Purdy threw the ball 26 yards in the air, sort of a soft line drive, and it looked like Vander Esch was going to have a shot at batting it away. The linebacker leapt. The ball was maybe 10 inches over his outstretched hand, and it settled into Aiyuk’s grasp at the 39-yard line. An absolutely perfect strike of a throw. The trailing corner, Stephon Gilmore, dove and shoe-tackled Aiyuk at the 43, or he’d have been gone. “Such a beautiful touch pass,” Shanahan said. “Turned out to be a huge play in the game.”
In a 42-10 game, how could that have been such a big play? Shanahan’s point: The Niners were up on a dangerous team 21-10, and this was the first series of the half, and the coach really wanted to come out and keep the avalanche coming. Seven plays later, Purdy to George Kittle for the third Kittle TD of the night, and it was 28-10, and the San Francisco sideline could breathe.
“That first one,” Purdy said, “was on me. I wish I had that one back. But I got another shot at it. We were able to adjust, throw it right over the ’backer and trust that Brandon was going to be there. I just had to do my job.”
So much of the Brock Purdy story is amazing, but this might be the most amazing thing: In 17 months, he’s gone from being the last pick in the NFL draft to a frontrunner for MVP. You may think that’s a stretch, because it’s just impossible that a player bypassed for seven rounds by 31 NFL teams could have a passer rating 27 points higher than Patrick Mahomes, and you doubt he could have led his team to 5-0 by an average margin of 20 points a game. But it is not a stretch. Five weeks into the season, Brock Purdy is playing MVP football.
*****
In the concourse outside the Niners’ locker room Sunday night 70 minutes since securing the win, George Kittle was greeting his family after the game. Cool night for the extended football family: George Kittle was a couple of hours from turning 30 (today’s the day), and when he emerged from his post-game media talk, the family sang him “Happy Birthday.” Twice.
“Three touchdowns!” Kittle said. “And I’m 30!”
A cool moment. Kittle realized he owed a bit of it to his fairly anonymous QB.
“Brock’s so consistent every day,” Kittle said. “He’s a robot.”
The 49ers dismantled the Cowboys, a team that had won by 30, 20 and 35 so far this year. “This might be the most humbling game I’ve ever been a part of,” Dak Prescott said. “I didn’t see it coming.” Maybe he should have. San Francisco owns the Cowboys. The Niners are their daddies. Prescott’s Cowboys have 39 points in three humbling losses (2021 playoffs, ’22 playoffs and this ’23 “Sunday Night Football” biggie) to San Francisco. Now the successor to Staubach, Aikman and Romo is confronted with this humbling factoid: Purdy is 2-0 versus Dak by a score of 61-22, and his four-TD night here could have been five- or six- had Shanahan needlessly kept his foot on the gas.
“I am so glad America got to see this,” fullback Kyle Juszczyk said. “Glad Brock got to have a four-touchdown performance on national TV. He deserves more respect than he’s gotten.”
The 49ers built this team methodically. Great pass-rush, punishing and athletic linebackers, great skill players … but the quarterback. It was supposed to be Jimmy Garoppolo, but he got hurt too much. Then Trey Lance, but he got hurt too much, and was just too green. The Niners stumbled into the next “then.” Brock Purdy. He was by far the highest-rated player on their board when the draft ended in 2022, and so they picked him; 47 college starts in a Power Five (Big 12) conference, on a little-engine-that-could team at Iowa State. So impressive at Iowa State that his coach, Matt Campbell, recited a poem of emotional praise to Purdy before his final college home start.
But it’s still a stunner to many that he’s here, doing such great things. You’re still doing a double-take (or triple-) over my assertion that Brock Purdy is playing MVP football. I’d go further. Through the first month of the season, Purdy’s the leader in the MVP clubhouse. Consider five points:
1. The MVP most often comes from one of the two top seeds in each conference, and it’s become a quarterback award. For the last 10 years, and 15 of the last 16 years, a quarterback’s won it. And for the last 10 years, a quarterback from one of the top two seeds in a conference has won it.
2. This morning, the top four seeds would be San Francisco and Philadelphia in the NFC, Kansas City and Miami in the AFC. Purdy, Jalen Hurts, Mahomes and Tua Tagovailoa would be the four quarterbacks. Among the four, Purdy is first in accuracy (72.1 percent), first in passer rating (123.1), first in TD-to-interception ratio (plus-9), second in yards per pass attempt to Tagovailoa (9.3 yards), third in passing yards (1,271) and first in team margin of victory (19.8 points per game).
3. This stretches to last year, and thus wouldn’t count in a 2023 MVP case. But I include it because, well, because it’s ridiculous. Purdy has played three quarters or more in 13 NFL games. In those 13 games, San Francisco is 13-0.
4. The most dominant team, which matters in MVP voting, has been the 49ers. Easily. Purdy’s not thrown an interception and has led his team to 30 or more points in every game.
5. No one thinks Purdy’s got a great arm. Consider MVPs with big arms. Brett Favre won three straight MVPs in the nineties, with average yards per attempt of 7.7, 7.2 and 7.5 yards. Purdy’s YPA, 9.3, and his accuracy of 72 percent mean two things: He’s got two great receivers in YAC (yards after the catch), but as one retired quarterback told me last week, “Part of a high yards per attempt, yes, is having great receivers who run after the catch. It’s also putting receivers in position to run after the catch by putting the ball exactly where the guy can catch it in stride and run after the catch.”
And there’s one other thing about the beatdown of the Cowboys. Shanahan and Purdy told me this wasn’t by design, but NextGen Stats late Sunday night reported that Purdy became the first quarterback in the eight-year history of NextGen to have thrown four touchdown passes outside the pocket in one game. The inference is interesting. Purdy’s not Mr. Mobile. But he had the football sense to move when he had to, and to make plays while moving. Two of his TD throws were made on the move. “They were definitely not by design. But you’re just playing football, and you feel the push, and you go, and you just make the play,” Purdy said.
This is not the opening salvo in a campaign for Purdy-for-MVP. It’s a simple acknowledgement that he’s playing great at the most important position in the sport, and maybe in all of sports.
I want to tread lightly here. I am not comparing Purdy to anyone … yet. Joe Montana was drafted 82nd overall in 1979 and won four Super Bowls. Tom Brady was drafted 199th in 2000 and won seven. Purdy’s played 11 months. So please, or as Jimmy Johnson would say, Puh-leeze.
But.
But … what I am saying is this kid has some traits of the good and great ones. He’s humble, he’s a worker bee, he’s not angry when people diss him, which is rare in the Deionish times. For instance:
Last week, The Ringer ranked the NFL quarterbacks, three days after Purdy went 20-for-21 in beating Arizona, and Purdy was 25th—below Mac Jones, Daniel Jones and Derek Carr. Have you watched the sport of football in 2023? Could you in any circumstance say Mac Jones or Derek Carr is playing better than Brock Purdy? I can think of a lot of words to describe ranking Brock Purdy the 25th-best quarterback in the NFL, but “logical” is not one of them.
Here’s a riff by Purdy to me late Sunday night, when I told him the Niners were 13-0 in games when he’s played at least three quarters:
“Every level that I’ve played at growing up it’s like you get to that level and at first you may think it’s a big deal, but then once I start playing it’s like, ‘Man this is just football.’ Youth to high school, high school to college, and college to NFL. Just football. Yes, everyone’s better at every level, but at the end of the day, man, you’re throwing a football to some guys trying to get open and catch it. And that’s really how I look at it. Try to keep it simple. This is a simple game.
“Then obviously my faith. I don’t try to get rattled and caught up in trying to have all this status and fame and all that stuff. I’m just a normal guy who’s trying to live out a life for God. That’s how I stay steady and level and even-keeled. If you were to tell me these stats last year, I maybe would’ve been like, ‘Man, that’s crazy.’ I came in as a rookie, and I was sort of in awe of everybody. But then once I got acclimated to the culture and the organization, I’m like, ‘Man, this is the standard, and this is what we’re trying to do.’ That’s where I’m at with my mindset. I don’t try to get caught up in what’s going on, what everyone else says outside.”
Isn’t that what you want your quarterback to do, instead of getting caught up in the maelstrom of the modern NFL world? When I told him lots of people still were skeptical of him, Purdy smiled and said, “It’s all good.” That’s a good thing: He realizes no one in his building cares that The Ringer thinks he’s a below-mediocre quarterback. And that’s all that matters to him. A football player who doesn’t listen to the outside noise. How refreshing.
Read more in Peter King’s full Football Morning in America column.
