Purdy and Warner Were Talking Trash to Each Other in Practice, and It Was the Best Thing I Have Seen All Camp

Warner won a rep and let the whole offense hear about it. Purdy threw right over his head to Deebo and screamed something back at him. Five minutes later they were standing together laughing. I've watched a lot of dead August practices in my life. That wasn't one.

My group chat has been dead for about ten days. That's what the third week of camp does to you. Somebody posts a practice note, somebody else posts a crying emoji about whoever pulled a hamstring that morning, and then it's quiet again until dinner.

Sunday it went off like a car alarm.

Practice 16, Santa Clara, hot, and Fred Warner decided he'd had enough of being polite. He read a route in the middle of the field, got his hands on the ball and put Kaelon Black on the ground on the same rep, and then he stood up and talked about it. Warner doesn't scream. He's worse than that. He says the thing quietly, right at you, and then he jogs back to the huddle like he's bored.

And Brock Purdy, who by every scouting report ever written about him is the nicest man in professional football, didn't take it.

Next series he stood in there and threw one right over Warner's head, over the middle, into Deebo's hands for a chunk. Then he turned around and let Warner have it. Loud enough that everybody on that field heard it, with a word in the middle of it I'm not typing on this website. He finished the day throwing a touchdown to Demarcus Robinson.

Mr. Irrelevant. Talking trash to the best linebacker alive. In shorts, in August, for nothing.

I know exactly how that sounds. It's a training camp practice and none of it counts and I'm sitting here writing eleven hundred words about two guys jawing over a rep. Fine. But I've been watching this team since I was a kid, and I've sat through the Augusts where you could see it on them, where the whole thing had the energy of a walkthrough at a corporate retreat, and I know what those Septembers looked like too. This didn't feel like that. Not even a little.

Then they laughed about it.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Not the yelling. A few minutes later the two of them were standing next to each other, talking, cracking up, and nobody had to walk over and pull anybody apart. No sulking. No separate ends of the field. They went at each other's throats over a rep in a practice that doesn't exist and then immediately went back to liking each other, which is the single hardest thing for a locker room to do and the reason I'm not worried about this football team in the slightest.

Colton McKivitz got asked about his quarterback afterward and said it about as well as anybody could. Purdy may give off quietness, he said, but no, he's got some fire in him for sure.

Yeah. Some of us have been screaming that into the void for three years while the national guys ran the same game manager segment on a loop.

Klay Kubiak got asked about it too and he loved it. Said he thinks it's cool. Said it's competitive, that it's respect between teammates, guys who can talk a little smack to each other and still be locked into the same thing. He's right, and I'd add that a coach who's nervous about his quarterback and his middle linebacker barking at each other in August is a coach who's about to have a very quiet, very obedient, very mediocre team.

Because you have to understand what the back half of camp actually is. Everybody's sore. Everybody's tired of the same faces. You're running the tenth install against the same defense that's already seen it nine times and there's nothing on the other side of the day except more of it. That's the week teams go soft. That's the week the standard quietly drops about four percent and nobody says anything, and then in November you're wondering why you can't finish games.

Purdy and Warner just refused to let Sunday be that.

And that's leadership, the real kind, not the kind that happens in a team meeting. Purdy runs the offense. Warner runs the defense. Whatever those two decide is acceptable on a Sunday afternoon in August is what the other eighty guys think is acceptable, and neither of them was willing to lose a rep to a teammate. Warner's not easing up on a rookie back. Purdy's not shrugging it off and jogging to the sideline after he gets shown up.

Think about who's watching that. Some undrafted receiver fighting for the last spot on the roster is standing there with his helmet off, and what he just learned is that on this team you don't get to take a rep off, ever, because the two best players in the building don't.

You can't fake that, and you can't install it either. There's a version of this exact story that goes bad. We've all seen the team where the quarterback and the defensive captain start jawing in August and by October there are two locker rooms and somebody's talking to a reporter without his name attached. This isn't that. This is two guys who genuinely like each other making each other miserable on purpose, because they both know whatever they can't handle in Santa Clara in a red jersey is going to end their January.

Warner's been the best all around linebacker in football for years and I don't think he's ever had to cover a quarterback this good every day at work. Purdy's never had a defender in his own building come after him like that. They're sharpening each other. You can point at the actual reps.

The rest of it was good news too, and honestly I buried the lede here for a thousand words. Kittle was back. McCaffrey was back. Both of them out there practicing, which is the thing half of Niner Nation has been refreshing their phone about since the last week of July. Kubiak called them two Hall of Fame caliber players who practice at a high standard and lift everybody up, and you could see it in how the whole offense moved once they were on the grass. Jordan James turned a corner and took off on one run and reminded everybody the room behind McCaffrey isn't empty either.

So: Purdy, healthy, with all of his weapons, against a defense giving him nothing. In the last week of August. I'll take it.

We open in Melbourne. Melbourne, Australia, against the Rams, which is still the most absurd sentence I've ever typed about this franchise. Twenty hours in the air, a week on the other side of the planet, a body clock nobody on that roster has ever had to beat before, and a divisional opponent waiting at the end of it. You can't coach a team through that from the sideline. Nobody's going to be there to plug them in at 6 a.m. Melbourne time.

You need guys who set the thing themselves and hold everybody to it when the coaches aren't looking.

On Sunday afternoon in Santa Clara, in front of a few hundred people and a handful of reporters, the quarterback and the linebacker stood there and showed everybody they're those guys. They fought over a rep that meant nothing, laughed about it, and went back out and did it again.

My group chat is awake again. I'd forgotten how much I missed that.

More on where the roster stands on the depth chart, the whole slate on the schedule page, and everything else this season on the 49ers hub.

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