The 49ers QB Has Done Nothing Wrong. But He Must Be Totally Destroyed in the Super Bowl.

Brock Purdy seems like a nice young man. The 24-year-old postgrad is inoffensive in every way. He dresses like a midlevel manager at a fintech firm and carries himself with the disposition of the second- or third-most-helpful person on a four-person group project. As quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, Purdy is a genuine triumph for underdogs everywhere. He was the dead-last pick of the 2022 NFL Draft—262^nd overall!—and before that was a four-year starter at Iowa State, which he helped turn from a football backwater to a pretty solid Big 12 program. (Just look at how emotional Purdy’s coach was when he congratulated him on Senior Day.) Now that Purdy is in the pros, cameras regularly cut to his proud parents beaming at his success from the stands. Purdy has done nothing wrong, and his only crime is that he’s enjoyed a little too much early-career success with the help of a supportive group of co-workers.

It is time, however, for Brock Purdy to receive his comeuppance. It is time for Patrick Mahomes to body-slam this kid out of the Super Bowl. See, Purdy has been on a magic carpet ride the likes of which this sport hasn’t seen since a young Tom Brady nearly a quarter-century ago. And despite Purdy’s superficial blandness and the lack of anything even approaching controversial behavior, he has become the subject of a football culture war that calls to mind arguments during Brady’s early career. Why has it happened?

Well, Purdy is both a quarterback and a lottery winner, playing in a system with a cartoonishly good supporting cast and the best offensive coach in the world. He gives off the impression of having it easy in a position that everyone knows is hard, and where most football fans live in the squalor of watching ordinary QBs fail to deliver. He has uncharitably failed to give his haters adequate ammunition to snipe at his character. And if Purdy is allowed to win the Super Bowl on Sunday, he will violate the ultimate hater’s doctrine of “No New Rings.” Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs already have a pair of recent championships. Most other QBs and the fans of their teams have not known recent happiness, and nothing would be worse than Purdy—a mere seventh-round pick—allowing yet another NFL fan base to feel joy. So, it is time for him to submit.

The discourse around Purdy is emblematic of something old and something new. The old thing: an unheralded QB having early, breakthrough success and spawning legions of jealous haters who want him taken down a peg, who want him proved to be a football fraud who’s succeeding by fluke rather than talent. The only thing more American than apple pie is attacking someone for finding fulfillment. Brady dealt with versions of this sentiment for years, with his adversaries sometimes crediting coach Bill Belichick and pure luck for his success. (The haters were wrong.) Tim Tebow dealt with it too. (The haters were right, at least once he left college.) The new thing: Purdy exists at a time when expressing harmless, even playful disdain for athletes has become controversial, leading to a holy war between Purdy’s stans and detractors.

Purdy has some real haters, surely, because he is a famous football player and humanity is an endless gutter. Search for various mean words associated with his name on Twitter, or go through enough comments on Instagram and TikTok, and it will not be that hard to find people saying out-of-pocket things. Those are not well-adjusted individuals, and most of us should be able to gather ’round the internet’s campfire and condemn actual, harmful vitriol directed at sweet young Brock Purdy.

But the vast majority of anti-Purdy sentiment amounts to nothing more than skepticism about his talent level or, even more gravely, a desire for him to lose a football game. Lots of that is about petty jealousy, but more of it is about the specific circumstances of Purdy’s success and the very nature of fandom in a sport that demands our attention all of the time, even though our favorite teams play just once a week.

Sports fans like winning, but more than that, they like feeling correct. That’s why ESPN and Fox have built entire daytime TV lineups out of shows where analysts do nothing but argue about sports. (The low cost of producing those shows is also a factor.) Purdy is embrace-debate catnip because he has posted absurdly good stats in his first two seasons while playing in what anyone with even a cursory understanding of the game knows is the most optimal offense imaginable for a young QB. He’s got a savant, Kyle Shanahan, calling his plays. He has a punishing offensive line with a Hall of Fame left tackle, Trent Williams, protecting him. He has the best running back in the NFL, Christian McCaffrey. He has a superstar tight end, George Kittle. He has two elite receivers, Deebo Samuel and Brandon Aiyuk. His pass catchers are seemingly always open and generate more yards after the catch than any other team. And he has a defense that helps ensure that he doesn’t usually need to score that many points to win games.

Purdy has also enjoyed some high-profile flourishes of luck. It feels as if they happen every week, even though they don’t. In a comeback NFC championship win against Detroit, Purdy heaved up a would-be interception that bounced off a defender’s face and into Aiyuk’s arms for a 51-yard completion. In the same game, Purdy ran around under duress and chucked up a duck of a throw in the other direction—a thing QBs are taught not to do—that receiver Jauan Jennings snatched away from the gods with one hand. If you like the 49ers, you want this to continue. But most of us don’t care about the 49ers. We care only about feeling validated, and it would indeed be validating to see Purdy be punished at some point. If the likes of Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, and Joe Burrow can be humbled, then surely Purdy can too.

Aggravating tensions, there’s a stark divide between how the NFL’s broadcast media talks about Purdy and how people on the internet do. TV pundits pump a lot of sunshine into the NFL, a league with whom their networks have lucrative partnerships, and most want to avoid coming off like weasels who are trying to make a player look bad. Outlets of all stripes have realized that explicitly positioning Purdy’s skeptics as haters is a good way to drum up engagement, so we get things like Fox commentator (and future Hall of Fame cornerback) Richard Sherman teasing his show by saying, “If you are a Brock Purdy hater, make sure you turn away!” Or the Athletic’s company account highlighting a tweet saying, “That’s what Joe Montana used to do,” with a note that says, “It’s a pretty tough night to be a Brock Purdy doubter.” (The post has gathered a purported 10 million impressions, many from people deriding it.) By simply existing, Purdy has become the red-meat issue that animates kitchen-table discussion all over the nation.

Purdy has gracefully floated above the fray, but his 49ers teammates have taken understandable joy in fueling the fire around the Purdy Wars. After the NFC championship, Nick Bosa called him “the best game manager in the league,” a finger in the eye of the anti-Purdy brigades. “What do you have now?” he asked, as if people who do not believe in the legend of Brock Purdy have nothing else to live for as long as Purdy wins games. Bosa should put on for his QB, and everyone else should want nothing more than for Purdy to go 14-for-29 passing for 143 yards, a touchdown, and two interceptions in the Super Bowl.

This dynamic isn’t just about Purdy. It’s a fundamental part of perceiving QB play. The position is unbelievably complicated, more than any of us who do not play it will ever know. Finding a QB who appears to be getting away with something is a way for most of the world to bump their opinions up from the 100 level to the 200s. It is also just an expression of taste, of the kind of play people would like to watch. The NFL has so many incredible quarterbacks now that we’ve gotten hooked on watching them operate on a near-godly plane. When a quarterback simply goes about his business and doesn’t wow audiences like Mahomes or Jackson or Allen, it is easy for his success to feel cheap. Tua Tagovailoa gets flak because much of his production has come on run/pass option plays that are easier to pull off than Mahomes’ sort of artistry. University of Michigan QB J.J. McCarthy fielded skepticism all year because the Wolverines were determined to win a national championship without ever making him show off serious passing talent for more than a few plays per game. The Wolverines succeeded in that quest.

Which is why Purdy must be stopped. If he wins on Sunday, 49ers fans will be inoculated forever against the petty barbs of jealous outsiders who don’t believe that Purdy is worthy of bringing happiness to a fan base. No group of NFL fans other than your own deserves to taste victory, and can you imagine how much it will sting if Brock Purdy is the one to deliver it to the Bay Area? It will be torturous to wallow in misery as 49ers fans enjoy confetti and the rest of us are left to rationalize how our teams with unspectacular QBs could win the Super Bowl too. But the even bigger trouble, if Purdy wins the whole thing, will be that millions of people who spent the fall mainlining NFL games will not get to claim that their mildly edgy anti-Purdy take was correct. That would be a major loss. And unlike Purdy (career record: 21–5), the rest of us lose pretty often.