On Sunday Night Football against the Dallas Cowboys, Brock Purdy was — for the first time — the player who has been described since he won the San Francisco 49ers‘ starting quarterback job: a spectacular passer able to deliver big-time throws one after another without making mistakes.
When you pair that with a 49ers offense that’s already rolling with the best scheme in the league, as well as with an unrivaled array of playmaking weaponry, you get a unit that can put more points on the Dallas defense in one game than four previous opponents did combined.
The Brock Purdy dynamic was not made for the modern world that lacks nuance. As soon as he broke out in 2022, lines were drawn and you had to decide whether he was the next Tom Brady or a complete construct of Kyle Shanahan — the next Nick Mullens.
The truth always lay somewhere in between. Purdy’s performances were never quite as good as the overall numbers, but his biggest strengths tended to kick in exactly when Shanahan’s plays ran out of answers, so the combination was always more potent than the sum of the parts.
Everything may have changed against the Cowboys, though. Purdy was dealing. He made three big-time throws against Dallas, which matched his season total in five starts and two more relief outings as a rookie. In all games put together heading into Sunday Night Football, Purdy had only nine big-time throws, or a rate of 2.5%. His rate was four times that in this game, with an average depth of target 9.0 yards downfield.
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