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Brock Purdy has Success UCL Repair Surgery on his Elbow

Good news for the 49ers.

Grant Cohn

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Good news for the 49ers.

Brock Purdy reportedly underwent successful UCL repair surgery this morning, according to the NFL Network. It was not a full reconstruction of the UCL, which would have ended Purdy's season. Instead, it was a repair, which means the UCL was preserved with an internal brace, which means Purdy should be able to begin throwing in three months, and should be able to start Week 1 of the regular season, assuming his rehab goes as quickly as possible.

Of course, there's no guarantee that Purdy's rehab will go flawlessly. And there's no guarantee of what his arm will be like when he finally returns. Will he have as much arm strength as before he injured his elbow? Probably not. So just how much arm strength will he have left?

And will he really be the 49ers' best option to start Week 1 if he misses the entire offseason? This is a young quarterback with only eight career starts. Is he good enough to roll off the couch and start Week 1? Is he that much better than Trey Lance, who has four career starts and presumably will take 100 percent of the quarterback snaps with the 49ers' first-team offense during OTAs, minicamp, training camp and preseason?

The 49ers need a Plan B just in case Purdy's recovery doesn't go 100-percent as planned. We'll see this week if they still plan to sign a quarterback. And we'll see what their plan is for Lance's future, if they have one.

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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.

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