Brock Purdy and the 49ers Are Better for Their Early-Season Adversity

The quarterback has shown he can lead a team struggling with injuries, and now, with Christian McCaffrey back, San Francisco is at a turning point.

Purdy helped lead the 49ers to a tight 23–20 win over the Buccaneers. / Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images

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Brock Purdy’s challenges, in Year 3, have been different than those of seasons past. And if there’s a way to wrap those up in a neat little package, it’d probably go like this: Where his first two years were about catching up to the speed of guys riding a runaway freight train of a five-year run, this year has been centered on getting others to catch up to him.

Brandon Aiyuk is out for the year. Christian McCaffrey missed the first two months of the season. George Kittle, Deebo Samuel and Trent Williams have missed time, too.

Over Purdy’s first two NFL seasons, many people wondered what he’d look like without the all-stars that the San Francisco 49ers have around him. In his third year, the 24-year-old believes he’s becoming better as a player for having to find out.

“The new guys, stuff with Ricky [Pearsall] and Jordan Mason, J.J. [Jauan Jennings] running some other routes that are new for him at a different position, for me, I had to see how these guys move and all that stuff,” Purdy told me after the game on Sunday. “Having B.A. and Christian and Deebo and George the last couple years, I know where these guys are supposed to be, and I know our connection. It’s been good. But this is the NFL. Not everybody’s always going to be healthy.

“So, for me, as a quarterback, how can I overcome that, go through my reads and progressions and move the ball and win without those guys on the field?”

The answer? Well, we’re all getting to see it now. And on Sunday, in as close to a must-win game as an NFL powerhouse like San Francisco is going to have in November, Purdy had plenty of solutions that went beyond having that rock-star supporting cast.

That said, it wasn’t easy finding a way to get back over .500 on the other side of the country against a similarly desperate Tampa Bay Buccaneers team. The first half was a rock fight. The Niners had to ride out three missed field goals. A muffed punt created a short field for the Buccaneers early in the third quarter and helped spark Baker Mayfield and a Tampa offense playing without Mike Evans and Chris Godwin.

And, as Purdy said, the Niners—even with McCaffrey back in the lineup, and old warhorses such as Kittle, Williams and Samuel coming off a bye week—had to rely on some guys that you might not have expected the team to at the outset of the season.

But that’s O.K. Actually, it’s better than O.K. If you listen to Purdy, it could even make the Niners better in January (and, they hope, February) for having gone through it.

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Week 10 may have lacked drama, but we have all the top story lines from Veteran’s Day Weekend in the NFL, including over in the takeaways …

• The difference in this year’s Pittsburgh Steelers.

• A nuance in how the Kansas City Chiefs stunned the Denver Broncos.

• Darren Rizzi on reconfiguring the New Orleans Saints, and the bathroom.

And a whole lot more. But we’re starting with the Niners and how, at 5–4, they’re somehow set up to be a force to be reckoned with again.

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Pearsall scored his first NFL touchdown to help San Francisco past Tampa Bay. / Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images

So, after Purdy posed that question to me—on the Niners having to overcome all of their unforeseen circumstances—I asked him how he and his teammates did it.

“We just went to work, practice, reps,” he says. “Ricky and I staying after practice to get reps, getting more reps with J.J., and then getting my guy Christian back and healthy and repping stuff out of practice. Going into this game, I felt pretty good about stuff. But it doesn’t matter until you get in the heat of the moment and execute.”

And against the Buccaneers, the rapport that’s been building on the practice field between Purdy and Pearsall, the first-round pick who’s been through his own adversity this year (he was shot in downtown San Francisco in September), showed up in-game.

On the Niners’ second possession, with McCaffrey back and already up to four touches, the quarterback went back to the rookie, trusting him to be where Purdy needed him.

“They pressured. It was Cover 3. He was able to get around the hook defender and get back in the zone,” Purdy says. “If you can catch a defense like that and you’re catching them on the move, it could be a gash, and that’s exactly what that was. Ricky got right behind the guy, and they were pinned up the field and made a huge play.

“I’m extremely happy for him; all the stuff he’s been through. And getting him back, it’s not just a feel-good story, getting him back healthy and alive— yes that’s true—but he’s going out and making plays and balling. It’s pretty cool."

It was necessary, too, since it preceded the offense bogging down against a tough Tampa defense.

Over the middle two quarters, the Niners mustered only two short Jake Moody field goals, one from 28 yards, and the other from 33. There was a 49-yard miss between those two, which only foreshadowed how the fourth quarter would go—and underlined how, at some point, the Niners offense would have to take command of the game.

That’s where coming off the bye was a factor. For guys such as Kittle, Samuel and Williams, it was a reset after injuries hampered the first half of their seasons. For McCaffrey, it set a reasonable target date for his return. The Niners first ramped him up after discovering his Achilles tendonitis at the end of the summer. It flared up on him before the opener. They shut him down for a month, then started to ramp him back up during Week 6, while the team was headed to Seattle for a Thursday night game.

A critical three weeks followed, and McCaffrey checked all the boxes through that period. The hope was he’d be ready around Halloween, and the fact that the bye fell that week allowed for the Niners to give him a little extra time before getting back on the game field.

Meanwhile, as those guys crept closer to full go, the offense had a chance to reset and realize that, at 4–4, things may not be as bad as some thought.

“It was just good for us to get a break, heal up, get healthy,” Purdy says. “We watched the film and saw that we’re right where we want to be. The plays are there. We just have to execute and make them. Last year, year before, we just executed so well. We were efficient. A lot of that’s on me—I have to make the right read and be aggressive. Having new guys out there with Ricky and Jacob Cowing, J.J., it’s a little different.

“More than anything, we’re drawing up the right stuff. Our scheme is there. We just have to execute and play team football. That was the biggest emphasis coming off the bye.”

And all of it came together when it mattered most on Sunday.

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McCaffrey returned to the 49ers' lineup after missing the first eight games of the season due to an Achilles injury. / Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images

There was 8:55 left on the game clock and the ball was at the Niners’ 47, when McCaffrey truly announced his return to the football world. Even better, he and Purdy did it together.

On the play, the Buccaneers sent a five-man pressure, and William Gholston sprung loose and got a free run right at the quarterback. Purdy stood in, took a big shot, and launched a moonball down the right sideline, believing that one of those trusted veterans he leaned on so much his first two years would get to it. Meanwhile, McCaffrey was running a wheel route, putting an ankle-breaking double move on Bucs linebacker Lavonte David to get free.

Thirty yards later, the Niners’ offense had broken through.

“We had some stuff going on, a guy that got through,” Purdy says. “I saw the matchup that we had with Christian. We’ve run that route a million times. I know that the safety is deep in the middle of the field. I just have to give Christian a ball where he can make his move and get under it. I took a hit, but we ran that route time and time again from practice to game reps. It was pretty nice having him back for the game in that moment.”

Purdy’s next completion—after a roughness call moved the chains one more time—would incorporate those same elements. With the plan breaking down a bit, Purdy leaned on another guy he knew he could count on.

This time it was Kittle, who got to the corner of the end zone, through unspoken communication with his quarterback, when Purdy broke the pocket to scramble left.

“Once I got back to him, I saw he had outside leverage to the corner,” Purdy says. “I just gave him a shot there, to keep it to the sideline and live to play another down [if need be]. Gave him enough room to get his feet in, and he made the rest happen.”

That made it 20–17, Niners. After the Bucs fought back to tie it, Purdy turned to the second wave of guys, with whom he’d grown a lot in the absence of the big stars.

Starting with the ball at his own 35, and with 41 seconds to go, Purdy hit Jennings for six yards, and Pearsall for six and 14. Then, with the game on the line, no timeouts left and 23 seconds showing, he put his faith in Jennings, long one of the Niners’ heart-and-soul guys. Snapping it at the Tampa 39, and with a struggling kicker, Jennings would have to be smart about how much time and yardage to take. Purdy knew he would be.

“He’s a dog in general—what he does for our team, run blocking and then catching the ball, making the guys miss,” Purdy says. “He’s one of the most underrated receivers in the league. In that moment, he’s just trying to make a play, trying to get as close in field-goal range for Moody. At first, I thought he needs to get out of bounds, and then he makes a couple guys miss, so I was like, Thank you, J.J., for doing that.

“Regardless, we didn’t want Moody to kick all these far field goals like we had earlier in the game. We just wanted to get him in a comfortable position to make the kick. We had all the faith in the world he was going to hit it. That was the mindset. Once J.J. made that play, it was like, All right, this is good enough. We didn’t want to force it anymore. We just wanted to run the clock out and kick the game-winning field goal.”

So Jennings fought his way to the 26. Purdy rushed the offense to the line to spike it with three seconds showing. And Moody, after missing 44- and 50-yarders earlier in the fourth quarter, knocked home the 44-yarder to win the game.

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The 49ers improved to 5–4 following their win in Tampa Bay. / Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images

As the Niners packed up to go back to California, with all those tangible lessons to reflect on coming out of Tampa, there was also the abstract that San Francisco took from the win.

McCaffrey’s return had that kind of value, giving the Niners a full Voltron feel, even if there is one pretty important piece, in Aiyuk, that won’t be returning. They know exactly what McCaffrey can do when he’s right, and what they can be, collectively, with him back.

“He can do everything,” Purdy says. “Extremely explosive when he has the ball, sees the defense, gets out of the backfield to run routes and then make plays off of linebackers and safeties. He sees the game so well. All you have to do is try to get the ball in his hands, and he makes the rest happen. His toughness and the ability to get up and keep going, he really does inspire us in the huddle. Just a guy you want to play with.”

And now, we’ll see where the Niners can take it.

At 5–4, they’re even with the 2022 team’s nine-game pace, and a game ahead of where they were at this point in ’21. Both of those teams wound up in the NFC title game. They’re also just a game behind where they were last year through nine. The schedule has its challenges—the Green Bay Packers, Buffalo Bills, Los Angeles Rams, Detroit Lions and Arizona Cardinals are all on there, and the Seattle Seahawks, Chicago Bears and Miami Dolphins aren’t pushovers, either—but the Niners know who they are.

Even better, they have a quarterback who’s had to answer the question so many had for him, whether he could carry a depleted team through the season’s first two months. How emphatically he’s answered it might be a matter of opinion, but whether he’s better for it is not.

The hope, from Tampa on this day, is the whole team will be better now after having to endure through many injuries to key players, and this could be where they take off together.

“We don’t know that, but we’re going to find out,” Purdy says. “We’d like to think so. The NFL is so crazy. We just got to take it week by week, game by game. We know that every game matters so much for us, and it has the last couple years. We’ve been in this boat before, but that doesn’t guarantee anything. We just have to put our heads down, give everything we have every single game, every moment and look up at the end.”

As for where they are now?

Purdy did lament the slow start, and the inconsistencies and all the stuff he knows could bite them when they are looking up at the end.

“We’re so hard on ourselves,” he says. “We have a higher expectation. A win is a win, and we were able to pull it off …”

But, clearly, they aren’t where they want to be, yet.

After all, the Super Bowl is still three months away.

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