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The 49ers actually do believe in Brock Purdy. And, yes, it sounds really, really weird to say that. But I’ve asked around enough. The confidence in the seventh-round pick in that building is real. It doesn’t mean he’s going to be the next Tom Brady. But in an NFL where the sky is usually falling for a team that has its quarterback go down (let alone its first two QBs), that’s most decidedly not happening in San Francisco.
And the proof is in how the first 30 minutes of Sunday’s game played out …
• The 49ers outscored the Buccaneers 28–0.
• They outgained them 290–111.
• They had 19 first downs to Tampa Bay’s five.
• Purdy was 14-of-18 for 185 yards and two touchdowns.
Cary Edmondson/USA TODAY Sports
The rest of the game, well, might as well have been on a running clock. Purdy was 2-of-5 for zero yards in the second half, mostly because it was time for the 49ers to close the playbook and mitigate risks as much as possible (particularly after Deebo Samuel got hurt) the rest of the way. But by then, we’d all seen plenty from Purdy—and 49ers players would swear what they were watching was just an extension of a lot of things they’d already seen.
“Man, you don’t come in and play that well and be that prepared by just starting in Week 13,” left tackle Trent Williams told me postgame. “For us, it was definitely not a surprise. In the NFL, it’s all about getting the opportunity. He got his opportunity. He made the most of it. He showed us everything that we’ve seen since camp.”
So what was that?
It was a two-yard touchdown run right up the gut in the first quarter. It was a 27-yard, back-shoulder(ish) throw to Christian McCaffrey. It was getting the ball to Brandon Aiyuk just in the nick of time—at the end of first half—before the rush got there and coverage closed on Aiyuk for a 32-yard touchdown. It was running the ball on third down when his team needed him. And it was avoiding turnovers.
It was playing well enough that the team could afford for his last snap to be taken with 14:20 left. And it all happened because Purdy was more than ready for the moment.
“I mean, you could just tell how smart he was,” Williams says. “He’s a pro-style quarterback and was lucky to not have to play in those quarterback-friendly systems in college, which in my opinion kinda stunts the growth for these players. You can tell he was coached really well. Mechanics are very good. And we’ve seen that in camp early. The decision-making, confidence, placement on the ball, knowing where to go with the ball. That’s something he’s been showing.”
What doesn’t hurt, of course, is what’s around Purdy. Williams said that Samuel told him postgame he’s gonna be O.K.—“even if he’s gotta sit a game or two, we need him back for this run, and we’re gonna get him back”—and so long as that’s the case, there may not be a better situation for a quarterback in the league.
The Niners’ already elite run game goes to another level with McCaffrey (14 carries, 119 yards Sunday), the passing game has the game’s best all-around tight end (George Kittle); its most versatile receiver (Samuel); a very viable, and fast, more traditional receiver (Brandon Aiyuk); and, of course, McCaffrey, too. Add Williams’s group to that mix, and San Francisco doesn’t need to ask the world of Purdy.
Even if, as a certain nickname would indicate, he’s ready to take on whatever they asked.
Which is why the Niners aren’t as worried about their situation despite others having concerns.
“It’s pretty much just operating like it’s another day at the office, man,” Williams says. “Like I said, Brock is not surprising anybody in this locker room. We’ve been able to see him since OTAs. We’ve been able to kinda get a feel for him. He’s a great player, man, so none of this surprises us. It’s just another day at the office.”
A good one, too.
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Trevor Lawrence is coming alive. The Jaguars’ second-year quarterback was 30-of-42 for 368 yards, three touchdowns and a 121.9 rating in Sunday’s breezy 36–22 win over the Titans—but it was more than just the numbers that jumped out in this one.
To me, Lawrence is starting to look as comfortable, and deadly a passer, and dangerous a runner, as he did at Clemson. And that means it sure looks like he’s put a rookie year in which all hell was breaking loose around him in the rear-view mirror, thanks in large part to coach Doug Pederson and his staff stabilizing the environment around him.
“Especially as a rookie, certain situations, there’s only so much you can control,” Lawrence told me postgame. “There were definitely some challenges that we faced here, and I learned a lot. I wouldn’t change it. I really learned a lot about myself, just kinda having to battle through a little adversity. Wouldn’t take it back, but I think just the way the staff’s come in and really started from the ground up, with myself, definitely, but everyone has been great.
“It’s just the system that we have and that we’ve built, and it’s really built on what we do well, what I do well. They do a great job of putting us in great situations to be successful. They give us answers. But I think that’s the biggest thing that I noticed is just our preparation throughout the week, the way we scheme teams up. Hasn’t been perfect every week, but most of the time, we’re in a situation to be successful, and it’s all about guys making plays.”
And there were a bunch that Lawrence made Sunday that we’ll take you through here.
• The first came in the second quarter and, really, required a little luck. Lawrence took a short drop-back on a second-and-1 from the Titans’ 20, and roped one between the hands of corner Roger McCreary and into those of Zay Jones, whose concentration was impeccable in securing the ball and dragging his feet in-bounds (he was initially called out before a review scored it a touchdown).
The play gave the Jags their first lead of the day at 20–14, and they wouldn’t trail again.
“I definitely lucked out there,” Lawrence says. “Really, I think it was the right read. It just wasn’t a great throw. The corner jumped in on the route, and I was throwing the corner [route] behind him and just threw it too flat. So he retraced and was able to make a play on the ball. But then Zay just … I mean, great catch. That’s what great teams do. You make plays like that when you have to, and obviously, it wasn’t necessarily me.
“That was him. But guys all around our offense did that today. Evan had a big touchdown catch—a couple—and just guys making plays when you need them.”
• The latter of those touchdowns was a gorgeous, 21-yard back-shoulder connection in the third quarter, with Lawrence finding tight end Evan Engram down the left sideline.
“What are we, Week 14, whatever it is now?” Lawrence says with a laugh. “I can’t remember, but that’s something you work on over time, and honestly, we’ve been trying to run that play for a while—to get him in on a linebacker, get that matchup on the outside and throw a go route for him. And he did a great job just making a play. The [defender] played so soft. Didn’t really have much separation. But he did a good job coming down with it.”
That pushed the Jags’ edge to 33–14 and effectively ended the game.
• In between those two scores was my personal favorite from Lawrence—a one-yard run in which he flashed being the sort of runner we’d see him be more often when he was in college. On the play, he took an option keeper to his right and immediately encountered Titans linebacker Dylan Cole. With the ball tucked in his right arm, he delivered a stiff arm to separate from Cole, then dove to extend past McCreary for the score.
“I did have a lot of experience with it in college, and I haven’t had the same amount of opportunities, necessarily, in that look here—to pull it on the edge,” Lawrence says. “I’ve always looked for that play. It’s really a designed handoff, but if I have an opportunity to get to the edge down there, everyone’s thinking run, especially in that formation. So if the edge guy steps out, I’ll pull it and just basically race to the pylon.
“It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. The guy actually recovered pretty well, so I had to get him off me. But that was kinda how I saw it.”
And so, again, we got a glimpse of what Lawrence is now, and what he could become, and maybe now where the Jaguars are going under Pederson.
“It’s a huge win, and that’s what we’ve been talking about —the rivalry, us and Tennessee,” Lawrence says. “Hats off to them. They put themselves in a position to where they’ve been the team to beat in the AFC South, so if you want to change that, it kind of had to start today. That was our mindset throughout the week, and obviously we didn’t play well at all last week. So just to come out and to respond and guys to be flying around, and we put ourselves in a position to where we’re still playing meaningful games in December, and, heading into January, that’s where you want to be.
“Everything is in front of us, and it’s gonna take some grit to win a bunch of these games down the stretch. But I really love where we’re at as an organization, as an offense, all the way around.”
I'd say the Jaguars are probably excited about him, too.
The Titans have shown some cracks of late. That was their third consecutive loss. They fired GM Jon Robinson last week. And now, they’ll have to work through that at 7–6, with the Jags suddenly alive in the race for the division title.
Here’s what Jeffery Simmons, arguably the team’s best player, told reporters: “Apparently, they wanted it more than us. They made more plays than us downfield. We turned over the ball four or five times. We didn’t get no turnovers. We got our asses kicked, simple as that. … Jon Robinson’s not out there with us. He made the decisions, but we’re out there playing football. Like I said, defensively, we gotta stop giving up all these plays.”
Tennessee’s last win was the Thursday-nighter in Green Bay a week before Thanksgiving, which was also the night that offensive coordinator Todd Downing got his DUI coming off the plane in Nashville. The Robinson firing, for better or worse, is part of the story here, too—it’s not common that teams, especially winning teams, make those sorts of changes in the middle of a season. And while the explanation I’ve heard is that this one is similar to the Mike Mularkey firing (where good isn’t good enough), speculation on how it went down has run rampant.
So the challenge is coach Mike Vrabel’s now. In all likelihood, owner Amy Adams Strunk is going to try to match a GM to him, whether it’s internal (Ryan Cowden or potentially Monti Ossenfort) or external. And that GM is going to be relatively close to a rebuild, with Derrick Henry’s mileage high, Ryan Tannehill’s contract up after 2023, and Taylor Lewan and Kevin Byard getting older.
Which is to say it's an important hire for Tennessee at a point when the football team itself is definitely in a funk.
Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports
That was one massive win for Baker Mayfield on Thursday night. You can get all the details on it in my story we published Friday on how the Rams, and Mayfield, got in position to pull off a 98-yard, game-winning drive with under two minutes and no timeouts to work with Thursday night against the Raiders.
But here, I think it’s worth asking what it might mean for his own future.
The Rams put Mayfield in the game not knowing whether they’d go back to a hobbled John Wolford. Mayfield did enough on that first possession, which ended with a 55-yard Matt Gay field goal, to convince the coaches to leave him in. And in the fourth quarter, Mayfield paid off the decision in a very big way.
O.K., so, first things first—I don’t think a team is going to suddenly back up the Brinks truck and stick the franchise quarterback label back on Mayfield, regardless of what happens the next four weeks. Getting back to being someone’s full-time starter will be a process. That said, if he can put together a good month, with a very beat-up offense around him, and add that to what happened Thursday, it’ll create opportunity for him.
What Thursday showed was his ability to ignite a team in a pinch with minimal practice reps, which is an important quality for a backup—since coming in without much warning and being able to prepare as the starter is getting all the on-field work are prereqs for the job. And with that on his résumé now, and 65 career starts under his belt, the next step for Mayfield could be a job where he comes in as a bridge starter for someone.
Maybe that’s even in Los Angeles—if Matthew Stafford were to retire after this year.
Which brings us to the second piece of this—this sort of spot is one Mayfield’s pretty familiar with thriving in. He arrived at Texas Tech without a scholarship and became the first true freshman walk-on quarterback to start a season opener in FBS history. He then transferred to Oklahoma without a scholarship, and wound up winning three Big 12 titles and the Heisman. So, suffice it to stay, he’s played from behind before.
“I love those situations. I love when people have those opinions,” Mayfield told me Friday. “I enjoy that. But it’s all about confidence within myself, and that was something that those guys on the sideline — between Z-Rob [Zac Robinson], Liam [Coen], Sean [McVay], Matthew [Stafford], John [Wolford]— just talking about the game plan, they just continued to build confidence in me. That’s where you can really see improvement and progress and just continued success is when you have that confidence within yourself.
“That’s when good things happen. And so, you know, yeah, it’s great to have situations where you quote-unquote are ‘proving people wrong.’ But when I’m confident, that’s when I’m playing my best, and those guys got me back to that point.”
Of course, given all he's been through, it’s not like Mayfield ever really doubted himself. Moreso, as he sees it, it was about getting in the right situation. And even after just a couple of days in L.A., he thinks he’s found it.
“I’ve never had doubt in my ability,” he says. “Situations have been different, and I’m not gonna harp on any of those. But the people that have been around me, working in some of these buildings, the people that really know ball, know what I’m capable of. And I’ll never let anybody else determine that for me, either.”
But in this case, it sure did help to have a few other guys on his side that he believed in, too.
And now that he’s back in that familiar spot, having to fight back from the ground up, we all get to see where Mayfield goes from here.
The quotes out of the Jets’ locker room on Mike White caught my attention. These come courtesy of the New York Post’s Mark Cannizzaro …
LT Duane Brown: “I told him I appreciate him.”
RB Michael Carter: “He’s a f---ing soldier. No disrespect to Zach [Wilson] or Joe [Flacco], but it’s really cool to play with him. I love him.”
WR Braxton Berrios: “He’s an absolute warrior.“
C Connor McGovern: “I told him I love him and appreciate him.”
S Will Parks: “That’s my quarterback.”
Indeed, White showed a ton of toughness in Orchard Park on Sunday. The Jets did, too, hanging with the Bills to the end before falling 20–12. That defense is for real, and was even after losing Quinnen Williams. And the arrow’s pointing up on the offense, too.
But looking at what all those guys said, it’s not hard to wonder what’s next for Wilson. It doesn’t seem like they can give him his job back this year, unless things go off the rails. And that would complicate how you handle his situation going into next year. So what the Jets have here is a very promising roster and a lot to look forward to, both for the next couple of years,and the longer term—and one massive question lingering in the middle of it all.
The Browns have to spend the rest of the season getting Deshaun Watson ready for 2023. Cleveland’s loss in Cincinnati was its eighth of the year, which puts a playoff berth somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible. And so the team’s final four games have to be focused on getting Watson closer to being the player he was in Houston and figuring out exactly what they'll need to do around him in March and April.
I will say that, after going six quarters without an offensive touchdown, Watson did start to flash a little more of the playmaking ability he’s been known for in the second half against the Bengals. His numbers over the final 30 minutes of the loss aren’t spectacular (18-of-30, 166 yards, TD, INT), but they do reflect that he was taking on more risk than he had over his first game and a half, which makes sense since he, and his team, were playing from behind.
“[He had] some really good moments,” coach Kevin Stefanski said. “I know there are some plays he wants back, but I thought there were some good moments.”
Watson, coming off a suspension after more than two dozen women described accounts of sexual harassment and assault, will make his home debut Saturday against a Ravens team that’s in a fight with the Bengals for the division, and likely without Lamar Jackson. Should be interesting.
I thought Todd Bowles delivered a quote you should pay attention to after his team got blown out in San Francisco. As you might imagine, this isn’t just about this year. It’s about where things are next year for the Buccaneers, too.
“We’ve got to decide what team we want to be,” Bowles said. “We can’t be one set of Bucs and another set of Bucs. It’s got to mean something. ... Either we want it or we don’t. We can’t care more than everybody else. As a coach, you don’t go out on the field, but we got outcoached, so we’re not excused from this at all. We got outplayed as well. As a team, as a group, we’ve got to buckle down and decide what our fate is in the next few weeks.”
Tom Brady’s going to be a free agent. And without a starting quarterback under contract for next year, Tampa Bay is slated to be more than $40 million over the projected cap, meaning it’ll have to do a lot of financial gymnastics just to get under.
Here’s the reality—absent Brady, it probably won’t be worth continuing to kick the can down the road cap-wise with the current core. So we’re entering a critical period for that franchise. Does Brady want to keep playing? If he does, will it be in Tampa? Right now, it looks like the likelihood would be he’ll either retire or play elsewhere next year. And the only way to change that, as I see it, is for the Bucs to start playing a lot better around him to create some sort of incentive for him to sign back there.
They have four games to do it.
Charles LeClaire/USA TODAY Sports
It was good to see J.K. Dobbins take a starring role for the Ravens on Sunday. He’s been through a lot, and it’s been a long road back from the knee reconstruction he underwent after tearing his ACL in the summer of 2021. He missed all of that year, came back at the start of this year, then had surgery again after Week 6 to have scar tissue removed from his knee.
He rushed for 120 yards on 15 carries in the Ravens’ win over the Steelers—yards that were important given Jackson’s absence, and yards that amounted to his first 100-yard game since the end of his rookie year.
“It’s still not me all the way yet, and I’m going to continue to get better,” Dobbins said. “Hopefully those 100-yard games will turn into 200-yard games. I’m going to keep getting healthier.”
Here’s hoping he does.
The Ravens thought the world of him before his injury in 2021—feeling like he was going to contend for the rushing title. We’ll see whether he can get back there.
I guess Justin Herbert isn’t so bad, after all. The Chargers quarterback hasn’t had the breakout year that many expected, and so there have been whispers that maybe we all jumped the gun on proclaiming his greatness (to be clear, NFL folks were very high on him, too—he finished fourth in my annual QB poll behind only Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and Aaron Rodgers at the start of this season). Well, it’s Week 14, and he just became the first quarterback to surpass 13,000 pass yards over the first three years of an NFL career.
And for what it’s worth, he has been through a coaching change already in his career, lost his left tackle for the year and played a good chunk of this season without his star receivers. So maybe, just maybe, we set the bar a little high for a guy who wasn’t afforded the kind of stability that, say, Allen or Mahomes had early in their careers.
“He’s about to blow this league away,” receiver Keenan Allen said.
And just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it’s not coming.
We have quick hitters for you, and we’ve got them now …
• Texans rookie Dameon Pierce deserves so much more attention than he’s getting. Really, really good player.
• It’s interesting that Russell Wilson got more effective in-game when the Broncos started moving him around—it does look like the Seahawks had it right, over the years, on how to most efficiently deploy Wilson as a quarterback.
• While we’re there, here’s hoping Wilson is O.K. coming back from his concussion. That welt on his head did not look good.
• Jerick McKinnon has become a legit weapon for the Chiefs, which is awesome, given all he went through in San Francisco. He had seven receptions for 112 yards and two touchdowns, and another 22 yards on six carries.
• McKinnon was also part of Sunday’s wildest play—that sort of sideways-shovel pass from Mahomes that somehow turned into a 56-yard touchdown.
• This is going to be an interesting week for Dan Snyder with NFL owners meeting in Dallas.
• I understand the Bills had their issues on third down against the Jets (2-of-13), but 10 carries for Allen in a regular-season game still seems like too many.
• The Giants aren’t slumping. This is probably where their talent dictated they should be all along. And good on Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen for continuing to build patiently, and not getting intoxicated by their hot start.
• The Steelers are one loss away from Mike Tomlin’s first losing season as a head coach. Which is pretty remarkable, since this is his 16th year in Pittsburgh.
• Saturday games start this week. Wild that we’re already at that point of the season.
Three for Monday
1) It’s hard to brand any regular-season game as a must-win, but Monday night seems close to that for the Patriots. The AFC wild-card race is tight, and New England has the Raiders, Bengals, Dolphins and Bills left on the schedule. Add to that a tough fourth quarter on Thanksgiving in Minnesota, and a Thursday-nighter that Buffalo controlled from start to finish, and it sure seems like how this game goes could go a long way toward painting how the Patriots finish the year and how they lay out their plan for 2023—in general, and specifically around Mac Jones on offense.
2) Speaking of Jones and the offense, to me, there’s been some obvious push and pull in how the scheme is set up, laid bare for everyone to see in the Buffalo game with Jones’s criticism of the conservative nature of the game plan, and quick-game calls in particular, caught on camera for everyone. I think what we’re looking at here is an offensive staff that found spread-offense concepts that worked for Bailey Zappe, and got him cheap, easy yardage that allowed the Patriots to manage their down-and-distance a little better with a rookie in there. So with the offense struggling, they’ve tried to help Jones by applying some of those ideas to generate more advantageous situations for the offense as a whole. And defenses have caught up to a lot of it. Where Matt Patricia and Joe Judge take things from here should be interesting to watch.
3) I’d look for Kyler Murray’s legs to be a factor in this game. Quarterbacks who can move have given Bill Belichick’s defenses trouble in the past—we’ve seen it with Allen of late, and it popped up in their game against Justin Fields as well. Murray has had double-digit carries in a game only twice this year. My guess is he’ll get there Monday night for an Arizona team that is much better (like most are) when it can run the ball effectively.
One thing you need to know
I didn’t know Grant Wahl that well.
But what I do know about him mirrors everything you’ve heard over the past few days.
Our former colleague at Sports Illustrated died at 49 on Friday while covering the Argentina-Netherlands World Cup match in Qatar. He was kind. He was passionate. And for U.S. consumers of the sport he covered, Grant was really it in a way few people covering any sport at any level are—the undisputed authority in his corner of this field.
But what I’ll remember most are the encounters I’d have with him every now and again at our old office on Liberty Street in Manhattan. I’ll remember them because there was so much in him that I think any sports journalist should aspire to. He loved—loved—the sport he covered, yet he wasn’t going to shy away from criticizing it as warranted, something he did with fervor as the crooks at FIFA got exposed. He was great to younger people in they business. And his view of soccer wasn’t the one many U.S. soccer fans take.
He genuinely wanted people to see what he saw in the sport. There was no pretense that if you didn’t see what he did, you were an idiot; or if you asked a dumb question (I had a few) then you weren’t worth his time. He knew the more people that came aboard to watch, the better it’d be. So whenever he and I talked, he might have some questions about his hometown Chiefs, and he’d happily answer any elementary thing I had for him about the sport he loved.
That, of course, would indicate that Grant was also just a really nice guy, and you’d be right to jump to that conclusion. Because Grant was the nicest guy.
So here’s hoping for peace for his wife, Céline Gounder, and his family in Kansas and elsewhere.
They lost a good one. We did, too. Rest easy, Grant.
