It’ll Take Only One Win to Make Brock Purdy’s $265 Million Deal Worth It
After handing Purdy a big-money extension on Friday, the 49ers are no longer the team with the star-studded cast and cheap QB. The question now is how they build around this contract—and whether Purdy can be the passer to get them back to the mountaintop.
When 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy was drafted in the Mr. Irrelevant spot in 2022, his $77,000 signing bonus was right around the entry-level salary for an infotech specialist in the San Francisco area. On Friday, the 49ers handed him a five-year, $265 million contract extension, and in exchange, Purdy has to do only one thing to remain the best bargain in the NFL: lead this franchise back to the mountaintop.
Purdy’s looming deal heavily impacted how the 49ers approached this offseason. The team was relatively quiet this spring, allowing key defensive players to walk in free agency, trading away Deebo Samuel, and overall tightening the purse strings in preparation for this contract. If you were a 49ers fan who genuinely believed that all the prior core needed was another healthy season to get over the hump, watching what were once top-end players leave without clear replacements had to be disconcerting. But these moves weren’t just necessary—they were optimal.
This team is no longer operating on that same year-to-year, white-knuckling timeline it had been since trading three first-round picks to acquire Trey Lance in the 2021 NFL draft—an all-time blunder that led the 49ers to find Purdy, its actual long-term answer at quarterback, in the following draft. Now, with a $265 million quarterback under center, the team has to focus on smoothing out its opportunities to contend over the life of this contract: meaning finding impact players through the draft and making timely transactions to acquire veterans at their peak. That’s precisely the position head coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch were in after acquiring Jimmy Garoppolo in 2017 and signing him to a five-year extension, so they’re familiar with it. But it’s a less comfortable way to live than how the 49ers were operating when they built the first iteration of this era as a contender—before they had expensive pieces on the roster or a deficit in draft capital.
While this franchise cleaned up its books before this extension and navigated similar roster-building questions with Garoppolo a half decade ago, $265 million is still a big number when we’re talking about a quarterback who’s never made an All-Pro team and has made only one Pro Bowl. Still, Purdy has earned this money by just about every on-field metric, even if you’re as skeptical as I am that this team will win games because of Purdy’s play in high-leverage situations. Of the 25 quarterbacks with 1,000 or more dropbacks since 2022, Purdy leads the league in yards per attempt, and the gap between him and Tua Tagovailoa in second place is the same as the gap between Tagovailoa and Baker Mayfield in 14th place. Purdy is second only to Lamar Jackson in passer rating and passing touchdown rate over the past three years, and his total expected points added as a passer is ahead of Jackson and Josh Allen—the two most recent MVPs.
Even with those numbers, Purdy is miles short of the elite class of quarterbacks we have in the league, and his statistical performance must be contextualized by the strength of his supporting cast and the schematic excellence of Shanahan. But he’s been good enough to merit what he’s being paid in the current market. There are only two starting quarterbacks entering 2025 who are younger than 30, no longer on their rookie deals, and earning less than $40 million annually: Sam Darnold and Justin Fields. Those two aren’t equals, but they are both fringe starters today, and bridge quarterbacks in the years to come.
Purdy’s clearly more valuable than them, and if you’re looking at this deal as optimistically as possible, he’ll essentially be earning top-15 quarterback money—not top eight—because his annual contract value comes out to around $45 million when you fold his 2025 earnings into the entire span of this new deal. By the time we get to the end of this contract in 2030, rookie extensions for guys like C.J. Stroud, Jayden Daniels, Drake Maye, and Caleb Williams will leapfrog Purdy’s and make us see this contract fondly, assuming he can maintain his current level of play. Doing so is a must, though, because the more pessimistic view of this deal sees Purdy as one of three under-30 quarterbacks who’s earning north of $40 million annually despite not having blue-chip tools as a passer.
The other two are Tagovailoa and Jalen Hurts, and where Purdy ultimately lands on the spectrum between the two as a playoff performer won’t just determine whether this extension was worth it—but how the Kyle Shanahan era in San Francisco will be remembered. Hurts isn’t just a champion now. He’s had two separate playoff runs that have cemented his reputation as a postseason riser, and that’s exactly what Philadelphia was banking on when they gave him a $255 million deal after his first Super Bowl appearance. Tagovailoa’s career arc, by contrast, has been more difficult to parse because of his struggles with head injuries, but his sole playoff appearance confirmed some leaguewide preconceptions of him—namely that he’s not good enough to get a talented but flawed team over the hump, and probably won’t deliver deep playoff runs in exchange for his $212 million contract.
Purdy’s current playoff résumé exists somewhere between those two. He was excellent in his playoff debut against the Seahawks at the end of the 2022 season, and had other flashes of impressive play two postseasons ago, but his other playoff performances have fallen far below what he’s put on tape in the regular season. Now, as he enters a season with a potentially weaker offensive line and aging playmakers like Christian McCaffrey and George Kittle, he’ll need to raise his level of play to make sure the attrition of his supporting cast doesn’t become as prohibitive schematically as his cap hit will be for the team financially.
Making the leap from good to great, whether individually and collectively, is the toughest challenge in sports. We saw Purdy’s first attempt at it last season, when injuries stripped him of much of his supporting cast. The results were mixed: He created a great deal of explosive offense early in the season, but his play faltered down the stretch and his lack of elite passing tools was an issue against defenses that played man coverage. That campaign made it clear that Purdy isn’t a hero or miracle worker, but it’s not inconceivable that his style of play could be the driving force for San Francisco en route to a championship—the team’s first since after the 1994 season—if he has just enough help around him.
Purdy wasn’t given $265 million to prove himself as a franchise quarterback, to be the true engine of this offense, to make an All-Pro team, or lead the league in passing. The value of this deal will depend on what happens over the next five years, when Purdy is faced with situations similar to the end of Super Bowl LVIII, between his 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. When the game is in the balance and he can no longer be buoyed by Shanahan’s schematic brilliance or rely upon the sublime playmaking skills of his supercharged supporting cast, Purdy will have to be a problem-solver—a quarterback who can create quality offense when the defense has the upper hand.
If it turns out that Purdy is a good regular-season passer and around average when the pressure is highest, I’d still consider that a success for him personally. Going from the final pick of the draft to a multiyear starter, reaching a Super Bowl, and meriting a big-money deal makes it impossible to view him or San Francisco’s process around him as a failure, no matter what happens from here. Not only is Purdy arguably the greatest draft success story ever, but he’s also already saved the jobs and reputations of Shanahan and Lynch once, winning enough to get this franchise through the aftermath of the Trey Lance whiff—and giving it a chance to extend its competitive window for another five years. Purdy is unprecedented, and he’s already impacted how we’ll see one of the most fascinating eras in NFL history.
But none of that will mean a thing unless he lifts the Lombardi Trophy.
