Brock Purdy is the type of quarterback and the type of draft miss that he can fundamentally alter how teams evaluate quarterbacks.
Whether Purdy goes on to become a career starter, more, or turns out to be a one-season wonder, it is evident that he is an NFL-quality quarterback.
The way he was viewed in the draft suggested most teams did not believe that to be the case.
So what did they miss? NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero offered an explanation to NBC Sports’ Matt Maiocco and Jennifer Lee Chan.
The key for Purdy, Pelissero said, is his processing capabilities.
“He’s like a lot of the guys that Kyle Shanahan has found through the years, where he’s not necessarily the biggest guy with the biggest arm, but he can process really fast,” Pelissero said. “That’s the number one characteristic Kyle looks for in quarterbacks is, ‘Can you process it?’ Because Kyle’s skill is he gets people open.”
Shanahan has long been a proponent of quarterback play being a mainly above the ears proposition.
Pelissero said that an unnamed scout told him Purdy would be a “long-term backup” and thought he would go undrafted. That scout, Pelissero said, admitted he and his colleagues grossly misevaluated Purdy.
With an arsenal of weapons on the 49ers, a quarterback’s main responsibility is finding the open target and assessing problems quickly
“On an offense that’s got Christian McCaffrey and Deebo Samuel, and [Brandon Aiyuk] and [George] Kittle, and go down the list, [Purdy] can function at a pretty high level because he can see it,” Pelissero said. “He can process it. He gets the ball where it needs to go.”