Forty-five-year-old Tom Brady puts up his NFL-record seven Super Bowl wins against rookie quarterback Brock Purdy in his first career start; Watch Tampa Bay Buccaneers @ San Francisco 49ers live on Sky Sports NFL from 9:25 pm Sunday
Sunday will see arguably the most controversial quarterback fight of all time when GOAT takes on Mr. Unrelated’.
Brady is also 45, while Purdy is just 22, making his first career start since a likely end-of-season injury to Niners QB Jimmy Garoppolo last weekend. Brady is 6-0 against quarterbacks in their first NFL start, while the age gap of 22 years and 146 days is the biggest between opposing quarterbacks in any game since the stats were first tracked in 1950.
Purdy arrived in San Francisco this year as a four-year freshman from college at Iowa State and also as a surprise candidate due to merely “average hand strength”, a “hard release” and “confidence and consistency issues”, according to his words. draft report.
All of this contributed to him not being picked until the 262nd pick in the seventh round, the final pick of the 2022 draft, and consequently earned the Mr. Olympia. Irrelevant Honors is a nickname given to the last player selected in the annual draft since 1976, when former 49ers wide receiver Paul Salata began honoring the man at an event in Newport Beach, California dubbed “Irrelevant Week”.
But last Sunday Purdy was anything but useless. A third-string quarterback who started the season in San Francisco showed up in the first half of their Week 13 game with the Miami Dolphins, and the team trailed 7–3.
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He immediately led them to a scoring 54-yard rush, finishing the pass with a touchdown to Kyle Yuschik, and then added another 76-yard TD right before halftime—this one ended with a Christian McCaffrey scoring—to give the Niners the lead from which they won’t refuse.
“Brock came in and made some big plays,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said after the win. “He has balls, forgive me for saying it that way.”
Purdy finished 25 of 37 passes for 210 yards, those two touchdowns and one interception, which led former NFL quarterback Chris Simms to be just as impressed.
“I was blown away by how Purdy played in that game,” Simms said on NBC’s Pro Football Talk (Sky Sports NFL, weekdays, 6:00 pm). “It was such a tough situation to put in a backup quarterback, let alone a rookie backup quarterback.
