No one is saying Brock Purdy is on Tom Brady’s level yet, but it’s hard not to notice the parallels between him and the future Hall of Famer.
That goes for Brady’s former teammates, as well.
Purdy has put a stranglehold on the 49ers starting quarterback job since getting thrust into action last season due to injuries to Jimmy Garoppolo and Trey Lance. He performed admirably before getting hurt himself in the NFC Championship Game, but has picked up where he left off this season.
Now, Purdy is knocking on the door to winning a Super Bowl in his second professional season – an impressive rise for the final pick of the 2023 draft.
That’s an awfully similar trajectory to Brady, a sixth-round pick who in his second season took over for an injured Drew Bledsoe and led the Patriots to a Super Bowl win over the Rams. He played well enough to get New England to move on from Bledsoe, and the rest is history.
FOX NFL analyst Rich Ohrnberger, who played with Brady in 2009 and 2010, told Willard & Dibs on Monday that the similarities are hard to ignore.
“They are insanely comparable. It is eerie how comparable they are, it really is,” Ohrnberger said. “In fact, Brock Purdy probably has an edge here because he started more games in college than Tom Brady. And so I look at Brock Purdy as kind of going through it a little more, playing in bigger moments all throughout his career compared to Brady at Michigan.
“Low round draft pick, injury hoisted them into action, better play than anybody expected and early success that really led the team, almost forcing the team’s hand to stick it out with them for one more year. …
“I’m not saying that Brock Purdy’s career is going to mimic Tom Brady’s seamlessly, I’m sure there's going to be divergence here soon. But over the first two seasons, there are eerie similarities between how they’ve gotten started.
Ohrnberger is of the belief that Purdy has benefitted from Kyle Shanahan’s system and the players around him as opposed to the inverse. Still, he could acknowledge that it was a while before people identified Brady as a sure thing.
“Even though I look at Brock Purdy through this prism of OK, he’s probably a second-tier quarterback and he’s being elevated by the players around him and his coaching staff … we could have said the same thing about tom Brady in the early 2000s. But at some point it switched, at some point Tom Brady became Tom Brady.”