Floors and Ceilings
yonder
If the Brock Purdy era wasn’t already made official when he came back from elbow surgery, it was cemented with the Niners’ trade of Trey Lance. This 49ers team (and its Super Bowl window) is now firmly in the hands of the second-year quarterback who—just a year ago—fell to the last pick in the draft mostly due to questions about his physical tools and lack of upside. So what can we (and should we) expect from Purdy as he enters year two and beyond? And—on a macro level—what is the value of a pocket passer without a strong arm in 2023?
There is likely no time in history when the running ability and arm strength of a quarterback is prioritized more at the quarterback position than it is right now. Part of that is due to rule changes that have increased defensive PI calls and decreased offensive holding calls during scrambles, as well as the never-ending emphasis on overprotecting quarterbacks inside and outside the pocket. Schematic shifts towards more spread-out formations have also led to larger passing windows down the field and RPOs and screens have created a plethora of underneath free-bees that even raw players can take advantage of as they develop.
That said, the key traits of successful quarterback play are—and will continue to be—knowing where to go with the ball at the right time and putting it there—two skills that are largely reliant on intelligence, accuracy, work ethic, and a preternatural ability to see the field and anticipate openings in defenses.
That makes the development of Brock Purdy—and effectively, any undersized signal-caller without plus athleticism or arm talent—so interesting in an era that is more obsessed with a quarterback’s physical traits than ever before.
Durability
Let’s look at the most triggering topic first, as likely no team in the league knows better than us the importance of having a quarterback (or eight) who is healthy and available. As stated in the Trey Lance write-up, backup quarterbacks have started a whopping 38.7% of regular season games during the ShanaLynch era, and we’ve had to turn to third-stringers (or worse) in four of the past six seasons. Given Purdy is the smallest quarterback we’ve deployed during this era—and is coming off a major arm injury—it’s worth wondering if we’re about to embark on yet another Jimmy G rollercoaster of endless injury woes. So let’s look at some measurable comps.
When people talk about Brock Purdy they pretend like he’s 5-6, 155 pounds and his mom just packed a PB&J in his red and gold backpack before dropping him off at practice. Purdy’s size is certainly a drawback, but he’s far from an outlier in terms of height, weight, and build among starting NFL quarterbacks. Using official combine measurements (because we all know the roster ones are B.S.), I found a couple of body types among current (and recent) starters that most closely match Purdy’s:
Bryce Young: 70.13” — 204 lbs. — n/a
Kyler Murray: 70.13” — 207 lbs. — 9 games missed/4 years
Russell Wilson: 70.63” — 204 lbs. — 5 games missed/11 years
Tua Tagovailoa: 72” — 217 lbs. — 14 games missed/3 years
Drew Brees: 72.3” — 213 lbs. — 18 games missed/20 years
Brock Purdy: 72.63” — 212 lbs — 1 game missed/1 year
Baker Mayfield: 72.63” — 215 lbs. — 2 games missed/4 years
Sam Howell: 72.63” — 218 lbs. — n/a
If size directly equates to durability, this is not the most optimistic list. Howell and Young get a pass because they haven’t played enough, but Tua and Kyler’s injury concerns are well-documented, and Baker and Purdy have already gotten banged up during their young careers. But there are two very durable players on this list—both future Hall of Famers—and they’ve stayed healthy in drastically different ways.
Russell Wilson is the epitome of the scrambling quarterback who can extend plays long enough to take shots downfield or eat up small gains on the ground—all while avoiding much (if any) real contact. Superior athleticism helps in this regard and so does having a build that is stout and more running-back-like than most of the guys on this list. On the flip side, Drew Brees started nearly 300 games over 20 years in the league by getting the ball out of his hands as quickly as anyone in NFL history. As always, you’re a lot less likely to get injured when you’re not getting hit, and that’s something that Brees (and Tom Brady) have mastered throughout their careers.
We love how Purdy can extend plays and make something out of nothing. It’s one of the defining characteristics that makes us hope he can ascend from the muddled masses of “system quarterbacks” into something greater. But there’s a time and place for all that, and within our YAC-obsessed underneath passing game, you’d hope Purdy can typically get the ball out quick enough that he doesn’t have to expose himself to unnecessary hits. As quarterbacks get more reps, they naturally get better at anticipating openings and releasing the ball quicker. Purdy’s already good at this. The faster he gets great/elite at it, the more likely he is to stay healthy.
Keeping Purdy upright and healthy will also be a task for Shanahan and the Niners. While I think Shanahan gets too much flak for the QB injuries, we haven’t always had clean hot routes to counteract extra pressure in our dropback game. With opposing D-coordinators likely to send extra rushers this season—and Purdy’s most natural counter to that pressure being his ability to read defenses and find underneath receivers quickly out of spread and empty sets—it will be critical that we always have an escape hatch outlet for our quarterback so that he can avoid unnecessary hits.
There’s also the elephant in the room of Colton McKivitz. I get that TJ Watt is one of the five best players in the world at defensive end, but the Niners surrendered three sacks in the opener and McKivitz allowed all of them—some so quickly that Brock Purdy never had a shot. Given his up-and-down career to this point and the fact that he played few meaningful snaps last year, our new starting right tackle was always going to be a worry spot heading into the season. After one week, those worries have only grown.
If McKivitz doesn’t improve, we may have to give him more and more help as the season goes on, but that’s easier said than done. Yes, George Kittle is an excellent blocking tight end, but he’s also an excellent receiver, and anything that prevents us from utilizing all our offensive weapons or forces us into more reps from specific formations limits what we can do offensively.
Sophomore Slump
Purdy doubters typically adhere to some combination of two separate arguments: (1) Purdy’s lack of physical tools and draft positioning means he can’t actually be that good; (2) he looked good for such a small sample size that he’s bound to regress to the mean after teams get an off-season to study and prepare for him. Basically, they don’t see Purdy as a rising young player but a guy who stumbled into a Vegas heater that is about to run its course.
The list of quarterbacks who’ve shown glimpses of stardom—or peaked during a small stretch of games early in their career only to fall into mediocrity—is a long one: Baker Mayfield went from Cleveland’s savior to the narrow winner of the NFL’s saddest quarterback battle. Vince Young followed up an exciting—albeit uneven—rookie of the year season and Pro Bowl alternate selection with a 9-to-17 touchdown-to-interception ratio in year two. The Matt’s (Cassel and Flynn) leveraged explosive fill-in starts into massive free agent deals in Kansas City and Seattle, respectively. Cassel proceeded to throw as many interceptions as picks while leading the Chiefs to a four-win season while Flynn got beat out by a rookie Russell Wilson and threw nine total passes in mop-up duty before being shipped off to the Raiders. Sample size can be a helluva thing.
But each of these players had extenuating circumstances. Mayfield played for the Browns—which honestly could just be the end of this sentence—under Freddie Kitchens (never not funny), and immaturity questions hounded both him and the organization throughout his tenure. Young had a fun highlight reel as a rookie but was horribly inefficient as a passer, threw for more picks than touchdowns in year one, and—in retrospect—we now know he was dealing with a number of undiagnosed mental issues such as bipolar disorder. Cassel went 10-5 in fifteen starts for the injured Tom Brady, putting up a respectable line of 3,693-21-11 in the process, but that becomes a bit less impressive when you realize that—just one year prior—Tom Brady piloted that same offense and led the league in passing yards (4,806), QB rating (117.2), and set a then-NFL record for passing touchdowns (50) en route to an NFL MVP and the league’s only 16-0 regular season. Finally, Matt Flynn torched the Lions for 480 yards(!) And six touchdowns(!!) in a Week 16 matchup that was pointless to the Packers (who had already locked up the #1 seed) but massively important to Flynn’s checkbook. The man he subbed in for that game? Aaron Rodgers, that year’s MVP.
In Purdy’s case, the inherent issues and expected drop-off that come from a player jumping into a new system and new supporting cast are nonexistent. It’s undeniable that teams will approach Purdy with a more specific game plan now that they’ve seen film of his tendencies and weaknesses. He doesn’t have a rocket arm. He’s a little too quick to escape the pocket at times. Defenders will start to key his habit of using a back shoulder turn to flush to his left out of pressure. But Purdy isn’t riding a fatty contract to a new team and a foreign offensive system. He’s not being brought in as the savior of a downtrodden franchise looking to steal some magic-by-osmosis from someone who's brushed by a future Hall of Fame quarterback. He’s plugged into year two of one of the best offensive schemes in football and surrounded by some of the best offensive weapons in the game.
Just as importantly, the rookie quarterback who hits the sophomore slump often does so because the league figures him out faster than he figures out the league. It so often comes down to issues of maturity, work ethic, and process, and—when it comes to those three traits—Brock Purdy looks like a bonafide blue-chipper. This is the guy who—as the scout team QB—would stay a half hour after each practice to run through the entire day’s script on air. Who—despite taking Iowa State to unforeseen heights—never had a “chip on his shoulder” mentality about the draft process, but was instead humble and self-aware enough to submerge himself in a biomechanics think tank to remake his body and throwing motion before his rookie season.
It is the process and the approach that have allowed the most impressive of player transformations throughout the years because when those qualities are elite, exponential learning and improvement become possible. That borderline psychopathic commitment to improvement has powered Jalen Hurts’ ascension from erratic-armed run-first QB to MVP candidate in Philadelphia. It let Tom Brady improve both his arm strength and his accuracy when many claimed that neither was possible. While it’s impossible to predict where that mental makeup will lead Purdy, I feel confident in saying that—at the very least—the league won’t catch up to him due to him not taking the craft seriously enough.
Arm Talent
Purdy has a quick, compact release, is comfortable throwing off-balance and from multiple arm slots, and his overall arm talent is better than most give him credit for. However, he’s never going to have a howitzer strapped to his shoulder like Allen, Mahomes, or this season’s toolsy draft-darling Anthony Richardson, and he’s unlikely to ever climb out of the bottom half of NFL starters when it comes to pure arm strength and velocity. Thus, the biggest question in Purdy’s game is how proficient he can become as a deep-ball passer, as any ability to stretch defenses down the field and outside the hashes opens up more for our offense than probably any other offense in the NFL.
According to PFF, these were the top ten highest-graded quarterbacks in deep ball passing (20+ yards in the air or more) during the 2022 regular season:
Geno Smith
Tom Brady
Joe Burrow
Tua Tagovailoa
Patrick Mahomes
Kenny Pickett
Mitch Trubisky
Daniel Jones
Josh Allen
Kirk Cousins
Of those players, Mahomes and Allen have elite arm strength. Geno and Trubisky have plus arm strength. Daniel Jones—just like with everything—is (at best) middle of the pack. But Burrow, Tua, Pickett, Cousins, and age-45 Brady are clearly in the bottom half of the NFL in terms of arm strength, meaning 5 of the top 10 and 3 of the top 5 deep ball passers have average or worse arm strength. That’s because deep ball passing in the NFL is less about elite arm strength and more about elite touch, accuracy, and anticipation—all traits that Purdy already possesses and can be improved with time.
In 2022, Purdy’s deep-passing numbers ranked 38th in PFF—behind all but three other starters—so there’s plenty of work to be done in the area, but rapid improvement in the vertical passing game is more common than you might think. As crazy as it seems now, Burrow was only 9-of-46 on passes of 20+ air yards and a single touchdown in 2000 for an EPA/dropback of -0.14. A year later, he jumped to 27-of-62 on those passes for an EPA/dropback of 0.77 while leading the league with 11 deep touchdowns. Tua—another regular atop vertical passing metrics—had a similarly explosive ascent up the ranks following a rookie season when his deep passing was anemic. Same with Derek Carr. Now, some of this vast improvement can be chalked up to the variability of the vertical passing metric. There’s also a legitimate argument that rookies usually aren’t great vertical passers because the awareness and anticipation needed to excel in that regard just isn’t likely to be there yet. But improvement as a deep passer without elite arm strength is very much a thing—especially for young signal callers—so that element of his game shouldn’t be written off quite yet.
That said, I do think Purdy’s arm strength needs to improve if he’s going to maximize his deep ball opportunities. While he has nice zip on underneath passes and between the hashes, you can see the ball drop or hit receivers on the wrong shoulder when he has to zip balls across his body or outside the hashes—particularly when he doesn’t have the time or space to step into his throws. One of the biggest bummers about Purdy’s elbow injury is that he couldn’t spend the off-season strengthening his mechanics and working to improve his arm strength. While huge gains in arm strength aren’t common, the fact that he reworked his body before the draft to create a looser whip of a throwing motion means a second and third off-season of biomechanic work likely can unearth a bit more. Sadly, we’ll have to wait until next season to see whatever gains that work could bring. But by just improving his arm strength a tick or two (while continuing to improve accuracy and anticipation via standard reps) could pay massive dividends. I mean, look at these cut-ups of vertical passes by Tua…
… or this video that the NFL won’t let me embed of some of Joe Burrow’s deep balls last year.
While the anticipation and accuracy are impressive, is there anything physically in these videos that you can’t imagine Purdy doing? Especially with a few MPHs more on his arm? Brock’s never going to be the dude threatening deep outs to the field side and off-script bombs down the field off a scramble drill. When the timing of a play goes to shit is when elite arm strength can’t be replicated, so Purdy will need to get his deep balls within the scope of the offense. But we don’t need a guy who lives on the deep ball. We need a guy who can do just enough of it to where defenses can’t crowd the box and key our inside passing and run game.
Potential Comps
LOW-END - Shake N Bake Garoppolo
No one wants a low-end projection, but I wanted to give a wide range of potential outcomes here, and this one seems as safe, boring, and pessimistic as they come. Purdy has already shown that he can operate the underneath game that we love to employ and hit guys in stride to set up YAC yards between the hashes. If he never improves on his deep ball and is more or less the same player we’ve seen but with some bad games and injury issues sprinkled consistently throughout his tenure with the 49ers, then we kind of already know what that looks like. After all, we’ve been living in it for quite a few years now.
This isn’t meant to disparage Jimmy G, as we won a lot of games with him, but I don’t think there’s a world where the bottom just falls out on Purdy and he becomes much worse than what Jimmy gave us. Brock’s ceiling may have questions but his floor seems solid. And while durability will certainly be a question until it’s not, Jimmy was about as routinely injured as you could possibly be in the NFL while still being considered a starting quarterback. So if Brock somehow becomes more injury-prone than Jimmy, well… he just wouldn’t be our starter anymore.
Thus far, the biggest difference between the two is that—even with a small sample size—Brock is clearly superior at evading pressure, improvising on the run, and working outside of structure (hence the “shake n bake” designation). While this projection implies that Brock doesn’t improve at all from what we’ve already seen and is inherently pessimistic, Purdy has only played well and only won games since taking over the starting job. There are far worse outcomes than a Jimmy G-type who is available and work outside of structure.
MID-TIER - Cold-Blooded Creative Cousins
Kirk Cousins gets a lot of shit for being a system quarterback, but what really hurts his reputation is the fact that he’s seen as kind of a lame dude who wilts in his team’s biggest moments. From a statistical and analytical view, this is still a guy who has thrown for 4,000+ yards in seven of his past eight seasons (the Niners as a franchise have only three 4,000+ yard passing seasons) and has finished as a top 15 PFF QB in eight of his last nine (including three top ten finishes in the past four years). Despite that, his reputation is dragged down by his penchant for playing for .500-ish teams that no one is scared of or gives a shit about, the 0-9 Monday Night Football record that he started his career with, and his 1-4 post-season mark.
To be clear, I’m not a Kirk Cousins apologist. I’m just saying there’s always been a little something missing that stops people from putting him in the tier of quarterbacks that you really get excited about. While it’s early, Purdy kind of already has the stuff that Cousins has been missing. The cool confidence that immediately wins over a locker room and takes him to an 8-0 record as a starter (with twice as many playoff wins than Cousins has in his career). The off-script creativity and elusiveness that Kirk has never shown and that has helped lead to his poor reputation under pressure.
To be fair, Cousins has better arm strength than Purdy and has made himself into a dangerous deep ball passer over the years, but his physical tools are very much in striking distance of our young signal caller. Someone who can make the variety of throws that Cousins can, and—when needed—lead the offense through the air to open up the ground game is incredibly dangerous in our offense. Add in the creativity and steely resolve that Purdy has already shown in his young career, and that’s someone who wins a lot of games.
HIGH-END - Baby Burrow
After it became clear that Purdy was the dude who was going to be leading us into last year’s playoffs (and likely beyond), the first comp that came to mind was Baby Burrow. Not because Purdy is close to the level of quarterback that Burrow currently is but because both of them have a similar demeanor, composure, and swaggy creativity about them despite neither having particularly strong arms.
Burrow is widely considered either the second- or third-best quarterback in all of football because of the gamer mentality he plays with and the incredible anticipation and accuracy he shows when throwing to every level of the field. Despite an arm that ranks in the bottom half of the league, his placement and his ability to release the ball before his receivers break open is unparalleled. He is, without question, the current gold standard when it comes to quarterbacks excelling without elite arm strength. Needless to say, even a lesser version than him is a lofty goal.
Once again, Purdy would need to up his arm strength and continue to improve his accuracy through his biomechanics work to even approach this kind of comparison. And we need considerably more information on how he plays in tight games before we know how consistently he can lead us to victory rather than just pilot the ship when things are going well. But I don’t think it’s at all out of the question that Purdy—with enough time and reps—can become a top 10 quarterback if everything falls right. Yes, the physical ceiling is real, but it’s impossible not to be impressed with everything else about his game, and—even in 2023—it’s the “everything else” that still separates the bad from the good and the good from the great when it comes to quarterbacks.
Go Niners 🏈👍