MR. RELEVANT

 

               The National Football League’s most-remarkable story during my sports-writing tenure (1983-01) was that of quarterback Kurt Warner.  The native of Dubuque, Iowa, didn’t start for Northern Iowa U. until his senior year, and went undrafted professionally out of college. Except for a brief tryout with the Green Bay Packers he had no brush with the league for the three years he spent with the Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena Football League, a minor circuit. Between seasons he worked as a grocery-store clerk, among other such jobs.

The St. Louis Rams signed him as a backup in 1998 but used him in just one game that year. Between seasons he was left unprotected in the draft that attended the Cleveland Browns’ return to the league, but wasn’t picked. He got into the Ram’s 1999 starting lineup at age 28 only after a late-preseason injury to the incumbent QB, Trent Green. Warner then led the Rams to the NFL championship, winning league and Super Bowl MVPs along the way. His 12-year NFL career would include another MVP award and a Super Bowl appearance with the Arizona Cardinals. He’s a member of the league’s Hall of Fame.

What was mind-boggling about the Warner odyssey wasn’t that he starred but that it took so long to happen. Even 25 years ago athletic talent almost never went unnoticed in this sports-crazy land, with scouts of various rank plotting the progress of likely youngsters from Little League-age on. To use a much-overused word, how the guy got to 28 without his potential being recognized was incredible.   

Now it’s 2023 and we have another Warner-like football player. He’s Brock Purdy, the San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback.  The parallels aren’t perfect-- Purdy was drafted after college in 2022 but as a seventh-round pick, 262^nd and last. That made him “Mr. Irrelevant”, the silly title given to the draft’s annual last pick because of a silly promotion by the coastal city of Newport Beach, California. It’s an “honor” that depends on the good nature of the recipient, if only because its several days of celebration culminate in the presentation of the Lowsman Trophy, a bronze depiction of a football player fumbling.  

 Purdy pre-NFL wasn’t so much a nonentity as a national-picture also-ran, albeit an honorable-mention one. He was a four-year starter at Iowa State U., winning most of his starts (29-17) but never doing enough to turn the right heads. Probably worse, he was (is) out of style at his position for his time, a dropback QB when superhero run-pass types such as Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson and Jalen Hurts are in vogue.

  If you lined up those guys in the playground with Purdy, and asked the typical fan to choose one for his team, chances are he’d pick one of them. If they lined up for a decathlon, the 10-event Olympic competition whose winner is widely recognized as the world’s best athlete, Purdy might well finish last. At a listed 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds he is unprepossessing physically, and his boyish mien makes him look younger than his 23 ages.

Differences in measuring quarterback excellence also produce quite-different results concerning Purdy. The two main devices are the official NFL one—called the Passer Rating—and another called the Quarterback Rating, or QBR.  The Passer Rating is the simplest, involving mostly the stats that appear in a typical game’s box score. The QBR is the product and possession of ESPN and purports to be far more inclusive, the result, the network says, of about 10,000 lines of computer code, whatever that means.

 I say “purports” because no one outside ESPN knows its formula for sure, the network guarding it like a national secret. Computer generated and video monitored, it’s said to weigh various stats by “holistic,” real-game importance; for example, a 40-yards-in-the-air pass completion is worth more for the QB than a screen pass and 40-yard run by the receiver. Similarly, a pass completion with a game on the line counts for more than one at “garbage time,” when one team leads by two touchdowns or more in a game’s final minutes.

The gaps between the measures are more than matched by their outcomes. The current NFL ranking puts Sam Howell of the lowly Washington Commanders on top (?!), while Purdy is eighth. Purdy is first in ESPN’s QBR, Howell is 21^st. Goofy, huh?  For the simple-minded like me, Purdy’s leading the league in both completion percentage at 70.2 and average yards per passing attempt at 9.4 yards is more impressive than either of the yardsticks. That last thing means the Niners average a first down every time Purdy throws the ball, much less connects. In other words, he’s a hell of a QB.

Obvious in both the Warner and Purdy cases is that the football scouts’ handbook had and still has large holes when it comes to talent evaluation. Purdy has assets that were hard to quantify—things like field awareness and the head to cooly process complex info under duress. Both of them fall under the heading of gridiron intellect.

  At an Arizona Fall League baseball game last month I talked with a man who said he’d coached Purdy in a kids’ football league when the lad was a 12-year-old seventh grader in the Phoenix suburb of Queen Creek. He averred he never saw a boy more into, and knowledgeable about, the sport. “His dad told me Brock would watch a TV game with a legal pad in his lap, taking notes about the plays. He’d have been an ace at 12 if his hands had been big enough to get around the ball,” the guy said.

That’s someone a good scout might have checked out.