What accounts for Brock Purdy’s quick processing speed?
It’s partly due to his wiring and partly because the San Francisco 49ers quarterback has been forced to make quick decisions with a football since he was 5 years old.
His father, Shawn, said he remembers watching NFL games on television next to his elementary school-aged son. While Shawn, a former minor-league pitcher who reached as high as Triple A with the San Francisco Giants and Atlanta Braves organizations, followed the football like most viewers, Brock had his eyes on the running back, the wide receiver and knew that the safety had moved from one side of the field to the other. And he could explain all the movements to his dad.
“It was stuff that didn’t even register with me,” Shawn said. “It was pretty wild.”
Shawn said he thought that ability stemmed from flag football, which Brock and his younger brother, Chubba, played in Gilbert, Ariz., from age 5 to 12. Both were quarterbacks.
The sport, which has rocketed in popularity and will be an Olympic sport in 2028, emphasizes quickness and accuracy. There’s one pass rusher who starts seven yards behind the line of scrimmage but can rush the quarterback right away. And the quarterback has to get rid of the football in seven seconds or the play is dead.
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“The ref is back there going, ‘One … two …’ so you’ve got to get rid of it fast,” Shawn said.
Like a lot of parents, Shawn and Carrie Purdy had some safety concerns about tackle football when their boys were young. More than that, Shawn said, was the speed of youth tackle football. It moved so slowly that he didn’t think it would benefit his sons and that they wouldn’t have as much fun.
He said he remembers Brock’s friends teasing him about playing a game in which you try to strip flags from an opponent instead of trying to take him to the ground.
“And sometimes his friends would come and play, and they would get their doors blown off,” Shawn recalled. “They couldn’t get over how fast it was.”
Brock was a natural fit. The league he was in held playoffs just outside the Arizona Cardinals’ State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. And if his team won that tournament, it was off to regionals in other states and ultimately the final rounds in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Brock’s team made it to that stage in 2012 when he was 12.
Brock Purdy (top row, second from left) found the speed of flag football helped his transition to tackle football, which seemed slow by comparison. (Courtesy of Shawn Purdy)
The next year, he started quarterbacking a tackle football team and found it easy.
“Because it was a little slower,” Shawn said. “People were like, ‘Hey, how long have you guys been playing tackle?’ And I’d say, ‘This is our first year. And they were like, ‘What?’”
Purdy’s high school coach, Preston Jones, said Brock was an advanced processor when Jones started coaching him as a sophomore. He thought that was largely innate. Indeed, Purdy’s score on the S2 Cognition test, which measures how quickly and accurately athletes process information, was in the elite range and was similar to what famously fast NFL decision makers like Drew Brees, Joe Burrow and Purdy’s Super Bowl counterpart, Patrick Mahomes, scored when they took the test.
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But Jones also noted that flag football probably allowed Purdy to sharpen that gift. And doing so from the age of 5 also seemed to set in motion a lifelong pattern: Purdy got a lot of high-quality repetitions at one stage of his development, which in turn allowed him to get off to a fast start and get a lot of high-quality snaps at the next.
In high school, for example, every snap Purdy took was either a run-pass option, a read option or a dropback in which he had to decide where to throw the ball. And there were hundreds of them during the week of practice.
“I don’t know if there was one play called in his three years where there was no thought process, where he just turned around and handed the ball off,” Jones said. “He was our trigger guy on every single snap whether it was run or pass.”
“Now, if Brock Purdy had gone to a different high school and didn’t do any of that stuff, he was still going to be an amazing kid, you know?” Jones continued. “But maybe that helped him with some of that decision-making and things like that. Because he had to read every single play.”
2024-02-01 13:05:53
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