Brock Purdy Is Throwing 70-Yard Touchdowns to Guys You Have Never Heard Of, and It Is Getting Ridiculous

Two 70-yard touchdown passes in one practice. A deep score to a receiver who had been on the roster for less than a day. Twenty-four of twenty-eight across two sessions. And the entire good half of the receiver room is standing on the sideline in a bucket hat.

Let us go through who is catching these

KhaDarel Hodge signed with this team on a Wednesday. On Thursday, in team drills, Brock Purdy dropped a deep ball in his hands for a touchdown. The man hadn't finished learning where the cafeteria is. He's a special teams player with a career built on gunner reps, he had roughly one practice's worth of route installs in his head, and Purdy put it on his numbers in stride down the field.

Malik Turner caught the other one. Malik Turner has been in this league for years as a core special teamer who makes rosters because he covers kicks. He caught every ball thrown at him Thursday, including a bomb that got the crowd at the SAP facility making noise you don't usually hear in the first week of August.

The day before that, Purdy threw a deep touchdown down the left sideline to Jordan Watkins, a second-year guy on his fifth catch of the practice. He also hit Junior Bergen and Patrick Taylor Jr. a running back, for scores in the red zone. And in the middle of that stretch he completed two touchdown passes of seventy yards apiece.

Seventy. Yards. Twice. In one practice. To guys whose names most of the national football audience couldn't pick out of a two-name list.

Now look at who is NOT out there

This is the part that makes the whole thing absurd. Ricky Pearsall is out for the season. Mike Evans has a quad strain. Christian Kirk has a calf. Jacob Cowing has a hip flexor. De'Zhaun Stribling has a hamstring and has been doing individual work only. That's essentially the entire top of the depth chart, gone, in the first week and a half of camp, on a team that has been finding new and creative ways to lose bodies since July.

So the first-team offense has been leaning on Demarcus Robinson, Deebo, Malik Turner, Jordan Watkins, Junior Bergen and a guy who signed yesterday. And the quarterback has completed 24 of 28 passes across two practices while throwing it seventy yards down the field for touchdowns.

Raheem Morris, who has to game plan against this every day, called him the layer king and said he liked the intensity, "he got fired up, which was cool, which was fun, which was competitive." That's a defensive coordinator's polite way of saying his defense couldn't do anything about it.

And people are still arguing about whether he is good

Here's where I lose my patience, because we've been doing this for four years now. Every August somebody decides the story is that Brock Purdy is a product of the scheme, or a product of the weapons, or a product of Shanahan, or a product of luck, and every time you take the weapons away he goes out and throws 70-yard touchdowns to a special teams gunner and a guy who signed yesterday.

You can't have it both ways. If the whole thing is the receivers, then explain this camp. Explain Hodge, one day in the building, running under a ball placed perfectly. Explain 24-of-28 with half the room hurt. That isn't scheme. That's a quarterback who knows exactly where the ball is supposed to go and can put it there from any platform, in front of a defense that knows what's coming and can't stop it anyway.

He's also, by the way, sitting on a 104.0 career passer rating, which would be the best mark in the history of the sport, and he's inside 150 attempts of qualifying for the record. That isn't a hot take from a homer with a blog. That's arithmetic.

What it actually means for September

Temper it a little, because I've watched this franchise long enough to know how August lies. These are practices. Nobody is tackling. The deep ball works better when the safety isn't allowed to blow anybody up. And the injury list is genuinely alarming, Shanahan himself is watching most of practice while he recovers from a car accident, which tells you what kind of summer this has been.

But the point stands, and it's the only point that matters heading into the season: whatever the receiver room ends up looking like, the guy throwing to it's going to make it work. That was true when it was Deebo and Kittle and Aiyuk. It's true now when it's Turner and a gunner off the street. Get Purdy anything resembling health at the skill positions and this offense is going to be a problem for people.

They walked through on Friday. Full pads again Saturday. I'll be watching the deep ball, because right now it's the most fun thing happening in Bay Area sports and it isn't particularly close.

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