HOW CAN 49ERS WIN THE SUPER BOWL AS PURDY STUMBLES IN BIGGEST GAMES?
Facing Patrick Mahomes, who savors his third NFL championship, it’s hard to believe Purdy’s up-and-down battles will anchor a team of generational talents trying to upend the Chiefs in Las Vegas
This is the end of the Brock Purdy fairy tale, in Las Vegas, where even he knows imaginary beings can lose in craps or have another fateful game in the Super Bowl. Those who’ve liked his story — 262nd pick and Mr. Irrelevant, rising as a starter for the San Francisco 49ers — also realize he can’t keep performing erratically against the Kansas City dynasty seekers.
Joe Montana showed up at the NFC championship celebration, handing the trophy to owner Jed York. But Joe Cool has nothing in common with Mock Brock. He threw an interception during “as bad a first half as we could have played,’’ said coach Kyle Shanahan, and he almost winged another trailing 24-10 in the third quarter. Forget Eminem, who shouted at 49ers fans inside Levi’s Stadium. Purdy singlehandedly was turning Detroit into a resurrected city, watching cornerback Kindle Vildor step under a deep pass with a shot at a killer interception. Somehow, the football bounced off his hands and facemask — another failure in Lions history — and wound up in the hands of a diving 49ers receiver, Brandon Aiyuk.
“Before the game, a ladybug landed on my shoe,” Aiyuk said. “That’s all I have to say. God was with us today.”
From that wonky point on, Purdy rallied again for a 34-31 victory, as he barely did against the Green Bay Packers. He threw a touchdown pass to Aiyuk, and when the defense forced a fumble, Christian McCaffrey scored and tied the game. That quickly, the 49ers had buried the unforeseen climb of the Lions and escaped from an inferior conference. Purdy avoided tacklers late in the game, with his legs, but they won in spite of him. He can move beyond Jared Goff and Jordan Love, but does anyone on Planet Earth who watched two games Sunday — except oddsmakers, who oddly have the Chiefs as 1-point underdogs — think Purdy can outduel Patrick Mahomes? It has taken years for Shanahan and general manager John Lynch to build generational talents on both sides of the ball, from McCaffrey and Deebo Samuel and George Kittle and Trent Williams and Nick Bosa and Fred Warner.
“There’s been unfinished business for a while, man,” said Shanahan, who blew one Super Bowl and perhaps another. “Our team has been set out for this for a long time. It has been a long year to get to this point, but we got it done today. The character we have, the type of guys we have, I can’t wait to get to Vegas.”
But his quarterback? What happened from Colin Kaepernick to Jimmy Garoppolo to Trey Lance to Purdy? For a while, he seemed an MVP candidate, but elbow surgery felled him after last year’s title game, and coming back, he struggled with four picks against Lamar Jackson and looked abysmal in the first half against the Lions. In his most shocking statement, he said Shanahan told him last offseason that the 49ers wanted to pursue … Tom Brady, to play at age 46.
“That meant so much to me,” Purdy told ESPN this month. “I remember him saying, if we can get Tom Brady, we're going to try to get him. And I was like, ‘Yeah, he's the G.O.A.T. I get it.’ But something deep down inside me was sort of like, ‘Dude, I just showed you that I can play well in this system. And we were one game away from the Super Bowl.’ More than anything, I was like, OK, now let's go.”
Would Brady have fared better? He sure wouldn’t be throwing picks and clogging up halves with mistakes. Clearly, the 49ers will spend Vegas time admiring Purdy. But this team has extraordinary skill and can’t just blow past inferior competition. What will happen when Mahomes is ravenous for a third championship? As the clock ran out, Purdy raced off the field in glee and was tapped on the helmet by Shahanan. I thought players might wonder what he’ll do to blow Vegas.
“Glory to God,” Purdy said.
More than that, maybe? “No one was freaking out. It’s football. There’s a lot of experienced guys on this team,” he said. “We were like, ‘We have to do our job.’ The season was on the line. We were down 17. We needed to play. I’m not going to be stupid. People can say what they want.”
And they will. You’ll turn on the networks this week and next and hear more bad juice. “Brock can operate in Shanahan’s offense at an extremely efficient level but doesn’t raise the level of play of anyone around him,” ESPN’s Ryan Clark said.
Others are blaming Lions coach Dan Campbell for late moves. On 4th-and-3 at the 49ers’ 30, he needed three yards and kept kicker Michael Badgley on the sideline — three points sorely missed when Goff’s pass to Amon-Ra St. Brown was off. That gave Purdy another opportunity, which he converted for a 10-point lead in a 27-0 rush. “I just felt really good about us converting and not letting them play long ball,” Campbell said. “They were bleeding the clock out, that’s what they do, and i wanted to get the upper hand back. It’s easy in hindsight. But I don’t regret those decisions.”
“That’s one of the reasons why they were here,” Shanahan said. “You win a lot of games making some of those decisions and then you make some decisions and you lose them. Doesn’t surprise me because he’s made a lot of those decisions through the year that won them a lot of games.”
It was curious to hear Goff, who had shots to put away his favored boyhood team, say beforehand that he expects contract extension talks soon. He’s in the last year of a $134 million deal and wants to be “one of the highest-paid quarterbacks” in the NFL. He didn’t make Purdy’s errors, but he didn’t claim a winnable game.
Who didn’t see Kittle, after recovering the final onside kick, staring at an on-field camera above him? He waved and called a teammate. That’s nice, along with Aiyuk’s ladybug line, but none of it explains why anyone should pick the 49ers over Mahomes and Andy Reid and Steve Spagnuolo and Travis Kelce and … why say the rest?
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.