Brock Purdy Has Added a New Dimension to the 49ers Offense—and It May Finally Put San Francisco Over the Top (2024)

Brock Purdy was a bad prospect. I’m positive he was. He was a four-year starter at Iowa State—good quarterback prospects typically come out before they’re seniors, and those who stay usually dominate in their senior year. Not Purdy, who was more efficient and productive as a freshman and sophom*ore than he was as a junior or senior. Purdy was a Shrine Bowl participant—that is to say, he didn’t make the Senior Bowl—and was the last pick in the 2022 NFL draft. Efforts were made last season to retcon Purdy’s draft process—look at his score on the S2 cognition test!—but nothing can change the fact that NFL teams passed on Purdy 261 times in the draft. The San Francisco 49ers themselves made eight selections before saying, “OK, sure, this guy.”

Purdy is also currently on pace for the second-best passing season of this century by expected points added per dropback.

Look at his company—elite quarterbacks. Every single one of them an MVP … or Josh McCown.

Of course, it’s been only five games. It is very likely that Purdy’s astronomical EPA number will succumb to the gravity of regression and fall out of the top 10. But what’s happening is what’s happening. From a production standpoint, we’re watching one of the best quarterbacking stretches ever.

So how did a bad quarterback suddenly become good? And by good, I mean potentially historically good? Well, that answer is very easy: his environment.

When Purdy attempted his first pass in the NFL, he did so on an offense with Deebo Samuel, Brandon Aiyuk, George Kittle, and Christian McCaffrey. That’s two top-15 (maybe top-10) wide receivers, a top-five (maybe top-three) tight end, and a top-two (maybe top-one) running back. It is not hard to argue that the 49ers skill position group is the best in the league.

He also took that snap for Kyle Shanahan, the preeminent offensive coach of the last five years. Shanahan’s system is everywhere—either deployed by a coach from his rapidly expanding tree or stripped for parts by unassociated offensive coordinators around the league looking to crib his best stuff. If there is a coach better at making offense easy for his quarterback than Shanahan, it is Miami’s Mike McDaniel, who spent five years on Shanahan’s staff—and even then, I think Shanahan might have the edge.

Shanahan in the headset. McCaffrey in the backfield. Deebo, Aiyuk, and Kittle in the route tree. You cannot ask for a better launching pad as a quarterback—first pick, last pick, or anywhere in between.

It is completely fair and accurate to say that this environment is what made Purdy suddenly go from the last pick to starting in last season’s NFC championship game. Of course it is. Under Shanahan, we’ve seen this offense elevate Jimmy Garoppolo, Kirk Cousins, and Matt Ryan; through the coaching tree, Jared Goff and Tua Tagovailoa. Similar schemes have elevated Baker Mayfield and Ryan Tannehill.

That’s the magic of the offense: By simultaneously minimizing the post-snap processing required from the quarterback and summoning explosive plays by maximizing yards after the catch, a mediocre quarterback can be elevated. Passing production previously attainable only by an upper tier of quarterbacks suddenly becomes accessible to the middle class. The exact same agents that made this offense a league-leading unit in the heyday of Garoppolo are making it a league-leading unit in the era of Purdy (with a little extra McCaffrey oomph sprinkled on top).

That’s not to say that Purdy is without credit—he works his tail off, has a cool head, and has legit skills to both execute and enhance the offense. But we have seen this far too many times to act as if Purdy is something dramatically different from 2016 Matt Ryan or 2017 Jared Goff or 2019 Jimmy Garoppolo. He is, unquestionably, the product of an excellent system.

But he also isn’t a Jimmy G clone. He’s different from Jimmy G. And the differences are very, very important.

Purdy is remarkably better than Garoppolo ever was late in the down. On dropbacks that take longer than 2.5 seconds, Purdy has a higher success rate, EPA per dropback, and explosive play rate—this despite making shallower throws.

Elevate the time to throw to over three seconds, and the difference becomes even more stark.

Why the big difference? Escapability is the variable. Purdy is far from an elite athlete, but he is fleet-footed and decisive, as well as eerily calm when outside of structure. (When considering a comparison between another quarterback supported by the Shanahan system in Tagovailoa, this difference in particular sticks out.) A player still short of a full season of starts should not be as entirely nonplussed by the screaming of their internal clock as Purdy is.

On these longer dropbacks, Purdy gets out of the pocket almost twice as often as Garoppolo did. When he scrambles—which he does slightly more often than Garoppolo did—his scrambles are much more valuable: a difference of 0.14 EPA per scramble.

We can see the effect of Purdy’s escapability in particular on pressured dropbacks. When pressured, Purdy is still better statistically than Garoppolo, but not to nearly as significant a degree. The only major difference: Purdy takes sacks at a significantly lower clip. Just by erasing those few negative plays, Purdy can get more pass attempts off when pressured—that difference would be enormous in any offense, but in the 49ers passing attack, the value is even greater.

After the Shanahan offense, the most common strategy in the league is to have a scrambling quarterback. Scrambles are up dramatically over the last few years, as teams simultaneously prioritize mobility at the position and encourage their quarterbacks, no matter how mobile, to escape the pocket and play out of structure. Purdy doesn’t actually cross the line, tuck the ball, and run that much, but he does extend plays.

The fact that Purdy can more reliably get out of the pocket and do something (anything!) outside of structure creates something the 49ers offense previously went without: a second opportunity within the down. With Jimmy G at the helm, the 49ers’ scheme either worked or it didn’t—when knocked off script, Garoppolo offered little to save the play; now, in those few moments in which the league’s best system fails, the quarterback can salvage something from the wreckage.

Brock is also qualitatively different from Garoppolo as a thrower. This difference is tricky to discuss because the Shanahan offense has changed over the last few seasons—most especially after the acquisition of McCaffrey, who confounds the entire Purdy-Garoppolo discussion. But there’s still clearly something here.

Look first at where they’re throwing the football. Garoppolo threw more often between the numbers in each season than Purdy has—the middle of the field, of course, being the area that the Shanahan offense attacks more relentlessly than any other.

The middle of the field (and in particular, the intermediate middle) is a precious area. Typically, the rules of passing distribution go like this: If you want an explosive play, throw it far downfield. It’s harder to complete the pass, but the payoff is great. If you want a high-percentage throw, throw it underneath—you’re unlikely to get a big gain, but hey, you’ll get something. And if you’re trying to maximize yards after the catch? Best to throw behind the line of scrimmage or, at the boldest, on a shallow cross.

The intermediate middle of the field is where explosive play, high-percentage completion, and yards after catch intersect. Hit a receiver in stride moving through the intermediate middle, and you can get a 20-plus-yard gain without a 20-plus-yard depth of target. That’s a huge opportunity, and nobody cashes in on it quite like Shanahan.

With Purdy, the 49ers are using the middle of the field less often and getting less yards after the catch for their efforts—48 percent of Purdy’s career production has come after the catch, relative to the 55.5 percent for Garoppolo’s from 2019 to 2022. This is both a product of where Purdy is throwing the ball—outside the numbers more often—and where Purdy is throwing the ball when he throws to the middle of the field. He’s throwing it deeper.

More throws outside the numbers and more throws deeper down the field. Purdy is taking an offense that previously funneled targets to the intermediate middle at unprecedented rates and yanking on its edges. The same stuff that always worked is still working—perhaps even better, for the fact that Purdy is willing to punish defenses that exhaust their resources defending the core. He’s expanding the borders.

Critically: The 49ers playmakers have not been given new roles to match Purdy’s ambition; rather, they’re just getting treated differently. Look at the downfield routes—post routes and go routes—for Samuel and Aiyuk. They run them at roughly the same percentages for Purdy and Garoppolo—but a far higher percentage of their targets have come on downfield throws with Purdy as the quarterback than with Garoppolo.

Purdy is willing to throw different stuff than Garoppolo was. You can argue that Purdy’s target distribution is more a product of necessary and unavoidable schematic tweaks, as Shanahan stays one step ahead of NFL defenses—but that’s missing the forest for the trees. It’s happening, and Purdy is a big part of the reason why.

These differences make the 49ers offense more effective under Purdy than it was under Garoppolo. It doesn’t really matter whether Purdy is another conjuring of the Shanahan spell—whether he is or he isn’t, the 49ers offense is harder to stop than it was before because it does more stuff than it did before. Take away the intermediate middle, and Purdy can hit you elsewhere; take away the first read, and Purdy can make a play late in the down. Purdy offers the 49ers tools that Jimmy G never did—tools to survive the bespoke defensive game plans seen in the postseason.

That doesn’t make Purdy the MVP. He doesn’t do nearly as much for his offense as Josh Allen does for his, or Justin Herbert or Lamar Jackson or Jalen Hurts or Patrick Mahomes. He is still far more a product than he is a cause. But he is, clearly, above the Jimmy G bar—the bar that Shanahan was so desperate to clear in these last few offseasons, when it became obvious that Garoppolo would be a liability in the postseason.

That’s why Shanahan pursued a Matthew Stafford trade in the 2021 offseason; why, when he struck out there, he traded up to draft Trey Lance in a fit of Josh Allen–induced inspiration. Shanahan wanted a bar clearer, a player who wouldn’t see his ceiling raised by his system, but would rather raise the ceiling of the offense by his talent alone.

I’m not positive Shanahan has found exactly that player in Purdy—that messianic franchise quarterback who can make it happen even under the worst of circ*mstances. Shanahan will keep looking for him, and eventually, he’ll have to find him—that’s what all coaches are doing, anyway. Looking for a top-five quarterback, or employing one and desperately trying to win as much as they can while he’s still that guy. But who knows? If Purdy keeps playing at this pace, he very well could be that guy.

What I do believe is this: The 49ers have also found a quarterback who is good enough to win the game that Garoppolo never did—the one at the end of the season. Purdy can make enough plays at the water’s edge, where the scheme and the personnel can’t account for everything, to push this offense through the postseason. He might be the weakest link in the 49ers offensive chain by default, but that doesn’t mean he’s a liability at all. Purdy can lug his own weight. And with him, the 49ers may finally be ready to do the thing.