Is Jordan Love Better than Brock Purdy?

Nick Bosa all but called Love a system quarterback Tuesday in the 49ers' locker room.
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The past 10 weeks, the two highest-rated quarterbacks in the NFL have been Brock Purdy and Jordan Love. During this period, Purdy's passer rating is 113, and Love's is 111.

Skeptics would look at those numbers and say they're a product of the offensive scheme each quarterback plays in. Love plays for Matt LaFleur, who's a disciple of Purdy's coach, Kyle Shanahan. Both coaches specialize in scheme receivers wide open. Which means skeptics would consider both Purdy and Love to be system quarterbacks.

Nick Bosa all but called Love a system quarterback Tuesday in the 49ers' locker room. Said Love goes through his reads quickly and finds the open man but doesn't make lots of plays like Purdy does. I'm guessing Packers players would say the same thing about Purdy -- that he operates the 49ers' system well but he's not a play-maker.

The truth is that both quarterbacks have the ability to make big, off-schedule plays, but neither one has to make them in order to win. Both quarterbacks' primary job is to not throw interceptions. And Love is much better at that than Purdy. During the past 10 games, Love has thrown three interceptions while Purdy has thrown 10. And that's because Purdy wants to be a playmaker and a gunslinger while Love seems content to be a game manager who can make a few plays when you least expect it.

Whoever wins this game will be seen as the better quarterback, but it seems likely these two will face each other in the playoffs quite a few times in their careers. Should be fun.


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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.