How Brock Purdy Changed how Teams Draft Quarterbacks

The 49ers didn't draft Purdy to play him -- they drafted him to back up Trey Lance. And Lance represents the old way of evaluating and developing young quarterbacks.

Brock Purdy has forced teams to completely reevaluate how they evaluate college quarterbacks. The entire NFL has changed because of him. And the 49ers spearheaded this change, but only by accident.

The 49ers didn't draft Purdy to play him -- they drafted him to back up Trey Lance. And Lance represents the old way of evaluating and developing young quarterbacks.

Lance has lots of talent -- he's big, fast, strong and smart. He has all the tools, but he hasn't put them together yet because he didn't play much in college. For decades, teams drafted players like Lance extremely high, sat them on the bench for a couple years and prayed for the best. This method didn't always yield great results, as the 49ers learned the hard way with Lance.

Trading up for highly talented yet inexperienced college quarterbacks is extremely risky, but that's exactly what the 49ers did with Lance. And that blunder might have cost everyone their jobs if they hadn't lucked into getting Purdy.

Purdy is the opposite of Lance. Purdy doesn't have much "talent" -- he's small and his arm isn't strong. But he's extremely skilled and advanced at the position because he started four years in college. And he's cheap because he was a seventh-round pick. So he's ready to play and he costs next to nothing. As opposed to Lance, who was expensive and green and needed development the 49ers never gave him.

Now, other teams have realized it's much easier and less risky to draft an experienced, advanced quarterback in the later rounds who can play right away than to trade up for a talented quarterback who's not ready to play. Bad news for the next Trey Lance.

Teams also have realized it's better to play a young, cheap quarterback like Purdy than to pay $30 million per season for a mediocre veteran. Bad news for the next Jimmy Garoppolo.

Purdy has completely changed the market at the most important position in sports. That's his biggest legacy right now.


Published
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.