QB Notebook: What’s Driving Brock Purdy’s Hot Start; Waiving White Flag On Cam Ward

Welcome to the Quarterback Notebook, where I’ll cover the past week in NFL quarterbacking — from the most interesting passers, plays and storylines to some other stuff that caught my eye while watching film this week. This week, we’ll look at the driving factor in Brock Purdy’s hot streak, officially give up on Cam Ward and pedal some Kyler Murray optimism. Let’s talk quarterbacks. It feels like 2023 again. The 49ers are tearing through NFL defenses with no signs of slowing down, and Brock Purdy is lapping the field in passing efficiency metrics. After filleting the Cardinals defense in a 36-30 win this past weekend, he’s back in the MVP conversation thanks to stats like this. All of Purdy’s numbers are outstanding, but this one might be the most impressive: We’re nearly a month into the season, and Purdy hasn’t been sacked. He’s the only starting quarterback who can make that claim. And as the analytics nerds will tell you, sacks are a quarterback stat, so Purdy deserves a lot of the credit for keeping himself clean … just not all of it. Purdy’s offensive line deserves some credit. He’s been pressured on a league-low 22% of his dropbacks, per Next Gen Stats. He’s faced only nine quick pressures, tying Kirk Cousins for the fewest in the NFL. For context, Jordan Love faced nine against Atlanta in the second half alone. Purdy is known for getting the ball out quickly, but his average time-to-throw is 2.91 seconds, a top-five figure. His hurry probability chart shows how staggering Purdy’s pass protection has been the last two weeks. The red line represents Purdy’s pressure rate the deeper he gets into a dropback; the grey line is the league average. Over the last two weeks, Purdy’s hurry probability three seconds into a dropback is just 15.8%. The league average is 33.2%, which means other quarterbacks are twice as likely to be pressured three seconds into a dropback. Purdy is essentially playing 7-on-7 out there. He’s playing in an environment that quarterbacks rarely get to enjoy. He’s still playing well, but that’s important context for his unreal statistical production. While the pass protection has been nothing short of amazing, Purdy has done his part to mitigate pressure. He’s handled the few quick pressures he’s faced with aplomb. If you take out the two screen passes, Purdy has completed four passes when facing quick pressure, and the plays are genuinely impressive. He made a jump throw from a fully collapsed pocket against the Rams. Against the Dolphins, he spun out of an unblocked pressure, flipped his hips, and found Mike Evans along the sideline for another completion. On this one, he steps up into space and hits DeMarcus Robinson on a crosser. The fourth completion was a bit lucky – Purdy overthrows the intended target, but Evans saves the day – but he did well to avoid a sack. The “zero sack” stat is the result of a perfect football storm. You have an offensive line playing at a high level, a play-caller who can de-fang a pass rush with pre-snap motion and play-action fakes, and a slippery quarterback with a knack for getting off a pass right before the pressure gets home. This offense hasn’t been tested by a top pass rush yet. The Rams were playing a hobbled Myles Garrett, the Dolphins defense is a zombie unit, and the Cardinals just aren’t very good. But with the Broncos coming up on Sunday, it’s a good bet that Purdy and the offensive line will be under fire this weekend. How will they handle it? The answer could set Purdy up for a legitimate MVP campaign – or it could derail his campaign before it really gets off the ground. I tried to hold out as long as possible, but Cam Ward’s stinker in a 12-7 loss to the Giants showed me enough. As much as I admire Ward’s ambitious approach to the position, the evidence that he’s a bad quarterback is too overwhelming. I’m even willing to look past the ugly numbers, like his 3-17 record after 20 games. Tennessee hasn’t put him in a position to succeed, and I don’t believe the Robert Saleh/Brian Daboll brain trust has done much to change that. But quarterback evaluation is mostly pattern recognition, and the patterns are easy to read with Ward: he does a lot of things we see bad quarterbacks do – throwing inaccurately, running into sacks, turning the ball over, etc. – and very few of the things we often see good quarterbacks do. Here’s the play against the Giants that finally forced me to throw in the towel. And it’s not the one you’re thinking. Sure, the game-ending interception was atrocious, but it wasn’t a bad decision. Just a bad throw. On this play, he makes two terrible decisions and follows them up with an exceptionally bad throw. The Titans are running an RPO. With two cornerbacks in tight man-to-man coverage and a safety creeping over the top, this should be a handoff, as there is no numbers advantage outside. Ward takes the pass option, and here’s what he sees out on the perimeter. The Titans are trying to pick the slot corner to free up Wendale Robinson, but the defender navigates the traffic while sticking tight to the receiver. Any discerning quarterback would throw the ball into the dirt or toss it into the stands. Ward throws it up field and directly into the hands of the defensive back. We often hear about quarterbacks throwing their receiver open. Ward throws the defender open here. From the pre-snap decision, to the post-snap decision, to the throw itself, everything is bad here. And while it would be unfair to hold one play against a quarterback, this reflects a much larger sample of bad process. At this point, the sample is too big to overlook. Kyler Murray’s first full game as the Vikings quarterback was a bit of a dud. He completed 15 of his 29 attempts for 168 yards and was sacked three times. That added up to a QBR of just 25.4, and Pro Football Focus graded him as the 18th-best quarterback of the week, so the more advanced metrics didn’t rate his performance highly, either. Those numbers lack some key context, though. It was Murray’s first full game in nearly a year, and he’s attempted just eight passes in a live game over that span, including preseason games. Murray struggled in all the ways you’d expect a quarterback needing to knock off some rust would struggle. He hesitated to make quick throws underneath, had some miscommunications with receivers, and holstered some deep throws we’ve seen him make throughout his career. Murray’s stat line wasn’t pretty but it wasn’t marred by ugly decisions. His lone interception came off a pass that was tipped and ricocheted off another player. PFF didn’t charge him with a single “turnover-worthy play.” The bright spots aren’t limited to bad play avoidance. Murray put a couple of throws on tape that will remind you he was once a first-overall pick. He connected with Jordan Addison on a big corner route after a play-action fake from under center. Before Justin Jefferson left the game early in the third quarter, Murray found him on a deep in-breaker off play-action. Murray linked up with Addison again on his lone touchdown pass, after changing the play at the line of scrimmage and manipulating the safety who could have helped out on the deep throw. Those two plays have to make Kevin O’Connell excited about what this passing game could evolve into as Murray continues to knock of the rust and acclimate himself to the Vikings offense. Murray doesn’t throw to the middle of the field with the confidence and ability Sam Darnold did in this offense two years ago, but he can match Darnold throw-for-throw outside the numbers and is a more efficient processor when running quick-game concepts. The 2024 Darnold-led unit finished just outside the top-10 in efficiency. With Murray in the lineup, this year’s offense has a similar ceiling. A quick aside before we move on: O’Connell couldn’t have foreseen Murray suffering a concussion in the first half of the opener, but it’s partly his fault his quarterback is so behind schedule. From putting on the shambolic camp competition with J.J. McCarthy to the lack of preseason reps for Murray, the Vikings coach could have done a lot more to get his quarterback ready for the season. Jalen Hurts could have played Monday night’s game with his left eye closed, and not much would have changed. But I’m less concerned with the lack of targets to the left side of the field and more worried about the complete dearth of targets to the middle of the field. That’s been the knock on Hurts throughout his career. He rarely throws to the middle of the field. The new offense was supposed to change that, but Hurts ranks near the bottom of the league in middle-of-the-field target rate. The Eagles aren’t calling play-action from under center, either. This Philadelphia passing game is starting to resemble the ones we’ve seen in past years. Here’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d be writing this season: Geno Smith is playing like a top-10 quarterback. That has little to do with Smith, himself. He’s a talented thrower with good pocket movement. I just didn’t believe the Jets could provide an offensive environment that would bring the best out of him. Through three weeks, they have and Smith is playing his best ball since the Seattle days. Since I did some light hating on Purdy, it’s only right that I credit him for this ridiculous effort that should have earned a completion. I blame Shanahan, who should have challenged the play on principle alone. This honor really belongs to Cam Ward and the throw I broke down above. But Andy Dalton gets an honorable mention for getting picked off on his only attempt of the night in Philadelphia’s loss to Chicago. How does a 38-year-old veteran get fooled by a rookie safety? Dillon Thieneman didn’t have to do too much on the play. He just slowly shuffled over in front of the receiver, and Dalton tossed him a freebie.