Jake Brendel Describes Brock Purdy’s Personality in the Huddle

"He's very direct and concise."
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LAKE LAS VEGAS -- No one on the 49ers knows Brock Purdy better than Jake Brendel.

Brendel is the player who snaps the ball to Purdy every play. In a sense, they're a tandem. So on Tuesday, I asked Brendel to describe Purdy's personality in the huddle.

Here's what Brendel said.

ME: Purdy is so humble and self-effacing to the media. I imagine he's not like that in the huddle. What's his demeanor on the field?

BRENDEL: "He's very direct and concise. That's what you want out of a quarterback in a game scenario. You saw it with that one play when he stopped the motion and made sure everyone was set before we snapped the clock because we were running out of time on the play clock. That's the type of grasp of the offense that he has. A lot of teams will just take a delay of game penalty. And that was a key part of the game for us, and it ended up being a pivotal play. That's the sort of thing that he brings on Sundays that other players don't."

Q: How does a young player like Brock earn the trust and respect of the veterans so quickly?

BRENDEL: "Just the way he came in that first game. We asked him to lead the team and fill a huge void in our offense for us, and he accepted that challenge and did nothing but have success. Every single day, it was like a flip was switched, like, 'I'm a starting quarterback in this league. I'm going to do everything it takes to maintain that.' And it's been nothing but reassuring every single day in the facility to see what he does."

Q: What do you consider his best attribute?

BRENDEL: "Just his dilegence? The fact that he works as hard as he does every single day. He's as prepared as possible for every scenario on Sunday. It's something you don't see across the league."


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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.