Brock Purdy Is 147 Passes From Being the Most Efficient Quarterback in NFL History. Nobody Wants to Say It Out Loud.

His career passer rating is 104.0. The all-time record is 102.2. The only thing standing between Brock Purdy and the top line of the record book is 147 more throws, about five games, and I haven't heard one national show mention it.

Here is the math, and it is not complicated

The NFL requires 1,500 career pass attempts before your career passer rating qualifies for the record book. That's the gate. It exists so that some backup who went 11-for-13 in mop-up duty in 1978 doesn't show up at the top of the all-time list.

Brock Purdy has 1,353 career attempts. He needs 147 more. That's five games. Five ordinary Sundays.

And his career passer rating right now is 104.0, on 11,685 yards, 84 touchdowns and a completion rate just under 68 percent. The all-time record, among every quarterback who has ever qualified, is Aaron Rodgers at 102.2. Lamar Jackson is at 102.1. Joe Burrow is 101.1. Patrick Mahomes is 100.8. Tom Brady is 97.2. Purdy is 104.0 and he hasn't qualified yet, which is the only reason his name isn't already sitting above every single one of them.

So sometime around the first week of October, barring an injury or a total collapse, the most efficient passer in the history of professional football will be a San Francisco 49er who was the last man taken in his draft.

The last pick. The literal last pick.

Two hundred and sixty-second overall. Mr. Irrelevant. They gave him the trophy and the parade in Newport Beach and made the jokes and everybody laughed, including me, because that's what you do with the last pick in the draft. He was the third-string quarterback. He was an emergency. He got in because two guys in front of him got hurt in the same season, which is the single most 49ers sentence ever written.

And now he's about to have the best career efficiency numbers anyone has ever put up. Not the best in the NFC. Not the best of his generation. The best that has ever been recorded in the sport, in the entire hundred-plus years of it.

Now here is the part that makes me want to throw something

You won't hear about it. You know you won't. The same crowd that spent three years building an entire cottage industry on the phrase "system quarterback" is going to find a way to explain this one away too, and I can write their scripts for them right now.

"Passer rating is an outdated stat." Funny how it was a perfectly good stat when Rodgers had the record. "He has never had to carry a team." He has thrown to street free agents for two straight camps and his numbers didn't move. "Small sample." He's at fifteen hundred attempts, which is the exact number the league itself decided was enough to call it real. "Shanahan's offense." Shanahan has had a lot of quarterbacks in that offense. None of them did this. Not one.

Fifteen hundred throws isn't a fluke. Fifteen hundred throws is a career. At some point the only honest thing left to say is that the guy is just really, really good at playing quarterback, and I've watched an entire industry contort itself for three years to avoid saying that sentence.

What it means in this building, though

Steve Young's career mark is 96.8. Joe Montana's is 92.3. Those are the two greatest quarterbacks this franchise has ever had, two of the greatest anybody has ever had, and both of them played in an era where the numbers were harder to come by. I'm not putting Purdy above them. Nobody is putting Purdy above them. Four rings and three rings are four rings and three rings and no spreadsheet touches that.

But this is the position where this franchise measures itself. Quarterback is the thing the 49ers are actually about. And the guy currently holding it's about to own a record that Montana and Young and Rodgers and Brady never held, and he's doing it while the roster around him lives in the training room.

What it means

It means the argument is over and some people haven't gotten the memo. It means the front office should stop treating the supporting cast like a nice-to-have and start treating it like the only variable left in the equation, because the quarterback is already solved, solved better than any team has ever solved it, if you believe the record book, and the record book is about to say so in writing.

Five games. That's all that's left. Give him a healthy receiver room and an offensive line and let the man go take it.

More coverage: 49ers section · Bay Area NFL · Columns · Bay Area Sports Blog home