With 4:57 left in the first quarter of the San Francisco 49ers’s Sunday game against the Miami Dolphins, the 49ers made a bit of pro football history. Rookie third-string quarterback Brock Purdy from Iowa State, the last player selected in the 2022 NFL draft, threw a three-yard touchdown pass to fullback Kyle Juszczyk.
Not only was this the first touchdown pass ever thrown in a pro football regular season by a “Mr. Irrelevant” quarterback, Purdy continued his streak as the only last-drafted player to even throw a pass in the regular season. Six quarterbacks before Purdy had been selected with the final picks in their drafts, and none of them had ever thrown a pass in a regular-season game.
- George Haffner, 1965 Baltimore Colts, McNeese State
- Randy Essington, 1984 Los Angeles Raiders, Colorado
- Larry Wanke, 1991 New York Giants, John Carroll
- Ronnie McAda, 1997 Green Bay Packers, Army
- Chandler Harnish, 2012 Indianapolis Colts, Northern Illinois
- Chad Kelly, 2017 Denver Broncos, Ole Miss
Kelly was the only other quarterback to even see the field in a regular-season game, and his only play was a kneel-down at the end of the first half in a 23-20 loss to the Los Angeles Rams in 2018.
Then, Jimmy Garoppolo suffered what turned out to be a season-ending foot injury with 11:22 left in that same first quarter. Trey Lance had already been lost for the season to a September ankle injury, so it was Purdy or bust. This was a guy who threw eight interceptions to 19 touchdowns in his final season at Iowa State, completed 30 of 49 passes for 346 yards, one touchdown, and one interceptions in the preseason, and completed four of nine passes for 66 yards, no touchdowns, and one interceptions in mop-up duty in San Francisco’s 44-23 Week 7 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs.
So, if you didn’t expect much in this game, nobody could blame you.
Somehow, Purdy came in against the Dolphins with a reasonable command of one of the NFL’s most complex offenses. He completed 25 pf 37 passes for 210 yards, two touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 88.8. Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa faced a much tougher defense than Purdy did, but Purdy actually outperformed the MVP favorite (18 of 33 for 295 yards, two touchdowns, two interceptions, and a passer rating of 79.7) from a pure passing perspective.
“Brock came in and made some big plays, he’s got some balls out there, forgive me for saying it that way,” 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan said it (that way) after the game. “We have to clean some stuff up, obviously, but just throwing him in there in the heat of battle like that, how much zero [Cover-0] that team did too, which you guys could see, that was a big plan of theirs and they had some good adjustments, taking away some of our hot throws, so we were having to change a lot of stuff on the fly. Putting a lot of pressure on him in that way and I thought he did a hell of a job doing it. Protected the ball well and made some big plays that I thought weren’t there always.”
The 49ers signed veteran quarterback Josh Johnson after the game, which means that Johnson now gets his fourth stint with the team since 2012. As Johnson has never thrown a regular-season pass for the 49ers in any of those stints, this is now Purdy’s job to lose, and the pressure in that job is pretty decent. The 49ers went to 8-4 with their 33-17 win, they currently stand with the third seed in the NFC playoff race, and they have everything you want in a Super Bowl contender from a run game and defensive perspective.
The stuff they need to clean up with Purdy was pretty evident on the tape, but it’s not as if the 49ers require a transcendent quarterback to make it to (or near) a Super Bowl. They made it to Super Bowl LIV with Garoppolo, and they were a few plays from beating the Rams in the 2021 NFC Championship game and going back to the Super Bowl with Garoppolo. The advantage the 49ers have is that they’re not built to need a top-10 (or even a top-20) quarterback to succeed. They’ve thrown more than the two touchdown passes Purdy threw just once this season, when Garoppolo scalded the Arizona Cardinals for four touchdowns in Week 11.
Now that Brock Purdy is the guy — at least in the short term — let’s get into the tape and see if he can be more than a one-week, feel-good story.