As he has risen from being "Mr. Irrelevant" to recently getting a big contract, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy continues to be brushed off as a product of head coach Kyle Shanahan's system.
NFL Network's Kyle Brandt went all the way with a bit about it, complete with a "Bot Purdy" Halloween costume, during the 2023 season.
After the announcement of his new contract, Purdy appeared on 95.7 The Game's "Willard and Dibs" Thursday. He was asked about the criticism and narratives directed at him, and to his credit he addressed the "system quarterback" thing head-on:
"Yeah, the whole system quarterback thing, early in my career, it was just funny hearing that," Purdy said. "And I'm not gonna lie, I took that as,all right, I'm a guy that can come in, and do what the coach says, and win games because of that. So, to me, that was more of a compliment, and I've sort of ran with that."
Purdy's numbers fell off across the board last season, due to injuries to a couple key 49ers' skill position players, the general underachievement of the now-departed wide receiver, Deebo Samuel, and the offensive line struggling to protect him adequately.
Amid his big 2025 prediction for the 49ers' signal caller, Fox NFL analyst Mark Schlereth jokingly said he did know what it meant when he praised Purdy being No. 1 in the league in yards per attempt since his first start.
A narrower look at just last season showed this, via CBS Sports fantasy football analyst Jacob Gibbs:
"Guess how many quarterbacks saw a lower percentage of their passing yards come after the catch than Purdy in 2024. Four. Out of 31 qualifiers, Purdy ranked 27th. Only 42.7% of his yards came after the catch. He was pressured at the 10th highest rate. Only 17% of his pressures resulted in a sack, the sixth-lowest rate."
Analytics prove Brock Purdy is not a system quarterback
Pro Football Focus recently took a look at which NFL quarterbacks relied the least and the most on checkdown passes last season (minimum 300 "aimed" attempts).
Purdy had the second-lowest checkdown rate in the league (7.2 percent), just 0.1 percent behind Caleb Williams' 7.1 percent). As writer Lauren Gray noted, Purdy "typically is not quick to check down, as he has consistently ranked in the bottom half of the league across his three-year career" with 86 career checkdowns. For a comparison, per PFF, seven of the top-10 quarterbacks in checkdown rate last season had more than 60 such pass attempts.
ESPN's Aaron Schatz has named his most underrated player at each position heading into the 2025 season. Purdy is the quarterback, with analytical context rooted in Schatz being a pioneer on that front in the football realm:
"Many claimed Purdy wasn't a legit MVP candidate in 2023 because he received too much help from San Francisco's offensive scheme and his talented teammates. Yet in 2024, while many of Purdy's teammates were injured, he still played very well."
"One area of outside help is the tremendous yards-after-catch production of the Kyle Shanahan offense. I have a model for YAC over expectation based on the air yards and location of each pass: The 49ers led the NFL in this metric for six straight years from 2018 through 2023, but they dropped to sixth last season. Purdy's overall numbers were strong anyway."
"Overall, Purdy performs well in metrics that try to separate a quarterback from his receivers and his blocking. For example, Purdy was seventh in the NFL with a 67.9 QBR for the 2024 season. Kevin Cole's adjusted quarterback efficiency, which attempts to adjust for everything from yards after the catch to dropped passes, had Purdy seventh in value per play (ninth in total value). And Purdy was fourth in Ben Baldwin's adjusted EPA per play (which also has adjustments for pass protection)."
Schatz concluded by addressing the criticism of Purdy's contract extension, with easy mention of the "system quarterback" narrative:
"Does Purdy's huge contract extension mean he is no longer underrated? On the contrary, some of the criticism of the extension suggests people don't understand how much better Purdy has been compared to the other Shanahan quarterbacks in San Francisco."
Now that Purdy is well-compensated, the effort to drive the "system quarterback" narrative will linger.
Anyone who wants to cling to that narrative also has to ignore or find fault with anything that goes against it, so get ready for some dismissal of the deeper data that shows Purdy is plenty capable.
