Is Brock Purdy a Great Quarterback?

It never was fair to call Purdy a game manager, because he's not a safety-first quarterback. He has guts and he throws with anticipation plus he can scramble and improvise.

Grant Cohn | May 17, 2024

Jan 28, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy (13) / Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

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San Francisco 49ers

For a while, Brock Purdy was the most underrated quarterback in the NFL. Now, he might be the most overrated one.

It never was fair to call Purdy a game manager, because he's not a safety-first quarterback. He has guts and he throws with anticipation plus he can scramble and improvise. Those are not traits of a game manager.

But now analysts are beginning to overcorrect their analysis of Purdy. He recently was ranked the second-best quarterback in the NFL by CBS, and people have started to call him great because he led the league in quarterback rating and went to the Super Bowl and lost to Patrick Mahomes.

Purdy certainly has had a great start to his career, and he may achieve true greatness one day, but he hasn't played long enough to be in that category. Great quarterbacks have to win at least one MVP or two Super Bowls. Those are my rules. Mahomes has won two MVPs and three Super Bowls. He's great. Joe Montana won two MVPs and four Super Bowls. He's great. Lamar Jackson hasn't performed well in the playoffs, but he has two MVPs, which doesn't mean he's a great quarterback, but it does mean he's a great player.

Purdy hasn't won an MVP -- he didn't get any first-place MVP votes despite leading the league in quarterback rating. And he didn't win the Super Bowl, either. He was solid but unspectacular in that game.

So no, Purdy isn't great yet. Maybe one day.

Published May 17, 2024

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.