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Kyle Shanahan Evaluates Brock Purdy After his Third Straight Loss

After the loss to the Bengals on Sunday, I asked Shanahan to evaluate Purdy. Here's what Shanahan said.

Grant Cohn

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SANTA CLARA -- For the first 10 games of Brock Purdy's career, he couldn't lose. Now he can't win.

Purdy has lost three games in a row and turned the ball over six times in that span. He's playing like a quarterback who's on the verge of getting benched. We'll see what the 49ers decide to do with him during this bye week.

After the loss to the Bengals on Sunday, I asked Shanahan to evaluate Purdy. Here's what Shanahan said:

ME: What do you see from Brock right now? Five picks in his past three games. None in his first five. What's going on?

SHANAHAN: "He made some bad picks there at the end. I thought he was one of the reasons we were in the game today. Some of those throws he made out there were unbelievable. The mistake in the red zone, missing the handoff was the biggest part. And then once you do that, you can't throw it or you're going to get the penalty, but worse that he got the pick. He was aggressive, thought the MIKE was going to pass on that second pick and the MIKE fell off right with Jauan. So just got to see it." 

GRANT'S TAKE: Shanahan wants to sound positive about Purdy, but the first thing he mentioned were the two "bad picks." That's a coach's way of blaming a player for the loss. When one player turns the ball over multiple times, it's hard to win. And Purdy has turned the ball over multiple times in two games in a row. And the 49ers offense has scored just 17 points in three games in a row. I doubt Shanahan blames himself, so that leaves Purdy to take the blame. Sorry, Brock.

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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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