Brock Purdy came out of Iowa State built a little too much like a running back. He has huge quadriceps muscles, which, as a thrower, put him on his toes more often and forced him to draw energy from muscles you ideally wouldn’t have used in a passing motion. He was, in a clinical sense, a bit “intrusive”.
It’s safe to assume that evaluators saw this and his relatively small stature for the position (6’⅝” at the NFL combine). And given his massive body of work—46 career starts for the Cyclones—they were able to determine that they knew everything they needed to know about a player they likely weren’t going to select in the 2022 NFL Draft.
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But Purdy also came out of college brilliant. It’s a proprietary cognitive test that some teams and coaches use to better understand how a player’s brain works — it measures functions like impulse control, which have a direct correlation to how likely they are to throw the right routes in correctly. situations. Purdy rated as a starting NFL quarterback. He had a library of experience and situational learning in his pocket.
He also came out eager to try something new. Most of the time, prospects are pushed through tape trainers to prepare them for the All-Star game, the combine and the pro day; they focus on things like the 40-yard dash, the shuttle runs, the bench press, the live throwing drills and board work with teams in private meetings. It’s a seemingly disconnected collection of experts, and most potential clients treat them that way.
But the idea of a comprehensive package of pre-draft performance training regimens piqued Purdy’s interest. What if so much of it was actually interconnected? What if he spent the days between his final collegiate game and draft day with a bunch of baseball players, an Australian-born QB guru and a weight room that might at times ask him to lift less than the weight of a football? What if the running back just became a bit more of a quarterback?
“This was one of the biggest measurable increases in performance we’ve ever seen,” says Will Hewlett, the guru and a house expert at the QB Collective (an expansive think tank founded by ex-NFL player-turned-agent Richmond Flowers, with connections to NFL coaches such as Mike McDaniel, Matt LaFleur, Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay). During the draft process, Hewlett says he added about 5 mph to Purdy’s pass, which, had the quarterback been a baseball player, could easily have triggered a performance-enhancing drug investigation. “It got to the point where NFL organizations said, What the hell did you do?”
That last line is a bit of a loaded question, especially when it comes to Purdy. A few months ago, he was the NFL Draft’s Mr. Irrelevant, the final pick at No. 262. He earned a spot as the 49ers’ third-string quarterback. Now? He goes under center for one of the NFL’s elite teams, and that fact doesn’t seem to faze anyone (as of this week, most betting markets have San Francisco as the fifth most popular team to win the Super Bowl ).
This is a story about what the hell they did on a small scale. It’s also a story about what they might have done on a larger scale, and whether there’s evidence that you can take one of the draft’s most accessible resources — quarterbacks who are sharp processors with a robust hard drive of in-game experience, but who are t physically reminiscent of the league’s best quarterbacks – turning them into one of the most potent weapons.
The process of giving Brock Purdy a better fastball started with the quarterback surrounded by 3D motion cameras, which track and map every aspect of his throwing motion. Here’s what the cameras found:
• He created too much elbow extension and elbow flexion when he brought his arm up.
• He needed to settle into a better pre-pass position, which involved dropping his hips and engaging his glutes.
• He didn’t pull nearly enough from his hip muscles on the throw.
• His spine was elongated.
• His forearm had too much movement and was not connected to the throw.
As soon as they identified the inefficiencies in his movement, Hewlett and a partner, physical therapist and clinical specialist Dr. Tom Gormely, began a complementary weight and throwing program designed to ensure an eight-week improvement over four or five weekly sessions. .
Purdy left Iowa State as a successful collegiate quarterback with some flaws in his game.
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In the weight room, Purdy began with a heavy, explosive movement designed to get his body to feel the changes Gormely and Hewlett wanted him to make, or what they called “base” movements. An example: a landmine pull to press, which involves a person standing next to a weighted bench press bar, grabbing the outside of the bar, lifting it up with one hand, and pushing through the bar with the other hand. the lower body rotates through, almost as if the person is throwing a shot put.
“I have to fix the limitations that limit him from producing high power levels early on,” says Gormely. “I can’t just tell him to rotate really fast if he can’t rotate yet. We’re starting to teach him with heavier, plyometric exercises the arm pattern and path and sequence that we want to produce quickly later on.”
In the early days, Purdy worked on small, technical aspects of the throw that don’t involve uncorking a second motion (like the rhythm of his feet in a drop back). But as the weight of his training work began to drop to include lighter and quicker movements, the speed and volume of his pitching began to increase.
An example of a two-day time period:
Monday weight room: “Overloaded” ball day, where Purdy uses a heavier ball in the weight room and focuses on exercises designed to improve arm path and sequencing of motion through the pelvis. In addition, there is a heavier lower body lift with a focus on the stability of the “base”.
Monday on the field: Very low volume throwing session.
Tuesday weight room: Aggressive training with rotational speed in the lower body. The workouts are designed to get Purdy to feel what it’s like to methodically accelerate through the spine and pelvis, while keeping that motion tied to the arm (one example is the delightfully noisy apparent “run and gun” medicine ball throw, in which a person sprints up to a point and throws a weighted ball against the wall). A lot of “underloaded” or light weight (less than a football) works to get him to feel the speed of his arm repeatedly. Sometimes players may use a towel, for example, while swinging their arm back and forth.
Tuesday on the pitch: Routes trees where arm speed and speed are required, cementing what he’s learned from a muscular standpoint in the gym.
“Brock took off,” says Gormely, summarizing the process.
Gormely and Hewlett would stay in touch or, often, attend each other’s sessions, making working with Purdy a sort of live editing process. Gormely would tell Hewlett what they were working on in the gym and what to look for in a throw, and Hewlett would report back to Gormely on what he saw during the throwing sessions that might require more attention and focus in the gym. Then Hewlett, through the QB Collective, could refine the expectations for Purdy at the next level, asking pro coaches for their thoughts, to make sure they weren’t drilling anything foreign to modern offenses.
They also saw Purdy relishing the idea of immersing himself in the lives and habits of hurlers. Gormely got his start in baseball, so the facility was crowded with major league and minor league baseball players during their simultaneous offseasons. Among them were Orioles pitchers Mike Baumann and Tyler Wells.
“He would sit down and be like ‘Big Mike, what do you focus on when you throw on the mound? What do you do with your back leg? He tried to pick up little things. Like, Mike throws 100 miles an hour. Brock wanted to know ‘How do you generate that much power?” They sat there eating lunch and cut it open. That curiosity makes him special. He wanted to learn.”
By the time Purdy arrived at the Shrine Bowl, a little more than a month after his last collegiate game (a loss to Clemson in the … makes it … Cheez-It Bowl), it was clear that he was honing his identity as a pitcher into more of what we see now. For example, late in the first half last Sunday against the Dolphins, when he faced an unblocked edge rusher running toward him, he hit a ball to George Kittle over the middle to pick up a critical first down. The whipping motion of his arm only took a fraction of a second. The ball cut through a zone with four defenders.
In his first NFL regular season game, Purdy was 25-of-37 for 210 yards, two touchdowns and an interception. His snap-to-throw time of 2.67 seconds was among the fastest for quarterbacks in Week 13.
“I know he went through a transition in terms of what he did,” said Eric Galko, director of football operations and player personnel for the Shrine Bowl. “He started for four years – why change what was working? But he knew he wasn’t a finished product despite going to school and playing as well as he did.
“He’s a guy that kind of suffered from the eyes of NFL teams from what I call ‘overevaluation,’ where they kind of knew what he was for so long that they kind of said, ‘Eh, that’s Brock Purdy.’ But we thought he wasn’t unlike a player like Baker Mayfield who a few years ago went No. 1 overall in the draft.
Adding to Galko’s optimism was the obvious: “It looked different. And to be that different, to show that you can improve in just a couple of weeks, see that kind of development, there was a lot of room for him to improve.”
With Jimmy Garoppolo out, the 49ers now look to Purdy.
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It brought forth an idea that is rarely touched upon in a macroeconomic sense. Currently, due to an increase in the quality and availability of athlete training and nutrition everywhere, we are at a point in the NFL where there are more incredible skill position players entering the draft every year. Since 2018 alone, we’ve seen Saquon Barkley, Nick Chubb, Mark Andrews, Deebo Samuel, AJ Brown, DK Metcalf, CeeDee Lamb, Justin Jefferson, Jonathan Taylor, Ja’Marr Chase, Jaylen Waddle and Kyle Pitts, just to name a small handful.
Why do we waste so much pain and effort trying to find quarterbacks who look like Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes, when they’re harder to find than a humble Twitter account? Why do we assume that someone like Purdy can’t get better, good enough to fuel the abundance of talent at the position currently flourishing in football?
This theory ignores what Hewlett and Gormely both independently addressed, namely Purdy is even a particular type of outlier in his own right, possessing the kind of intelligence and leadership skills that allow him to climb into this position in the first place. In fact, 49ers tackle Trent Williams told a reporter this week of Purdy, “You’d think he’s Peyton Manning or something” given the comfort with which he goes after far more experienced, veteran teammates.
If that’s the case, maybe there’s something to be said for the 49ers’ hopes for a seventh-round rookie, and for the kind of prospect who knows himself well enough to realize that, even if he might be good enough to make the NFL , he can still relearn how to throw a fastball.