All 49ers

The 49ers Need To Use Play Action More Frequently

The 49ers aren't playing to Brock Purdy's strengths this season.

Grant Cohn

Oct 6, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy (13) looks to hand off the ball to running back Jordan Mason (24) during the first quarter against the Arizona Cardinals at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-Imagn Images
Oct 6, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy (13) looks to hand off the ball to running back Jordan Mason (24) during the first quarter against the Arizona Cardinals at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-Imagn Images / Kelley L Cox-Imagn Images
In this story:

SANTA CLARA -- The 49ers aren't playing to Brock Purdy's strengths this season.

He's an elite play-action passer. He can turn his back to the defense, fake a handoff, spin his head back around and find open receivers incredibly quickly. Plus he can throw while rolling to his right or his left.

That's why Purdy's play-action passer rating this season is 133.9 and his play-action completion percentage is 81.8.

Meanwhile, Purdy's drop-back passer rating is just 88 and his drop-back completion percentage is 63. Clearly, the 49ers need to call more play-action passes. But they're calling fewer this season than ever before.

On Tuesday, Purdy was asked about this troubling trend. Here's what he said courtesy of the 49ers' p.r. department.

Your play-action is down this year from what's been in the past. Is that a function of that when teams are dropping more, you don't want to turn your back because you need that extra time to go through progressions? What do you kind of attribute that to?

“I don't know if that's the case. I would say, you’ve got to be running the ball really, really well and then setting up certain plays and stuff. Where we're at, I think we're running the ball really well. But I think within schemes and trying to win with certain plays drawn up, for us it's just been drop-back plays. We trust in the guys to just be able to drop back and allow me to go through a progression and rip it to them. We're not going into a game saying they're going to drop back a lot so we're going to stay away from the play-action pass. We still have plays dialed up in the play-action world, but we just haven't had opportunities to run them in the right situations or whatnot. But again, we're trusting in [head coach] Kyle [Shanahan] within all the play calls with that regard. And so, that's just sort of just how the flow of the game has gone and the play calls have gone.”

Download and follow The Best 49ers Podcast.

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.

Home/News