Is Brock Purdy's Production Sustainable?

It's entirely conceivable that he will finish the season with the best passer rating in the NFL.
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Statistically, Brock Purdy is the most efficient quarterback in the NFL this season.

He leads all quarterbacks with a pristine passer rating of 123.1. He has thrown 9 touchdown passes and 0 interceptions. He has completed 72.1 percent of his throws. And he has won all of his starts.

Can Purdy keep up his current level of production?

Clearly, he'll throw an interception eventually. But it's entirely conceivable that he will finish the season with the best passer rating in the NFL and perhaps the best completion percentage, too. He's good, he fits the system perfectly, the system is excellent and the supporting cast is outstanding.

As long as Christian McCaffrey, Brandon Aiyuk, Deebo Samuel, George Kittle and Kyle Juszczyk are healthy, Purdy will be tough to stop, because he reads defenses so quickly and always finds the open man. And there's always an open man on the field when Kyle Shanahan is drawing up the plays for those playmakers.

Very few if any defenses in the NFL have enough talented players to cover all the 49ers offensive weapons. That's a big reason why Purdy's numbers are off the charts.

But the 49ers still have one relative weakness, or at least something that isn't a strength -- their offensive line. It's serviceable. It punches above its weight. But it can get pushed around by big defensive lines like the one in Philadelphia. Remember, the Eagles knocked out not one but two 49ers quarterbacks in the NFC Championship Game.

The only way to slow down Purdy and the 49ers offense is to pressure him constantly. Not many teams can pull that off -- the Cowboys sure couldn't. The Eagles might be able to. We'll find out in Week 13 when these teams face each other.


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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.