By Michael Silver The Athletic
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The conversation began with a question about accuracy, a sensitive subject for Kyle Shanahan in the summer of 2022. His newly anointed starting quarterback, Trey Lance, looked inconsistent during the first week and a half of training camp, missing easy throws and sending errant passes into the hands of 49ers defenders. It had been a trying offseason for the second-year quarterback, who tweaked his mechanics, shortened his throwing motion, and experienced arm fatigue that caused concerned coaches to hold him out of drills. Now, in summer practices open to media members and fans, Lance looked less like a franchise QB than a work in progress. That “hidden horsepower” Shanahan had been intent on releasing remained concealed, if it existed at all.

It was one thing to miss an open receiver on a rollout swing pass. Missing on a quarterback drafted third overall, especially when it had taken three first-round picks to acquire that selection? That could be ruinous for a coach, and for a franchise. The 49ers were all in on winning a championship in 2022, and seemingly all in on Lance. His predecessor, Jimmy Garoppolo, was still technically on the team. However, Garoppolo had already said goodbye in an emotional farewell press conference in early February. Given his $24.2 million salary and its impact on the team’s salary cap, the presumption was he’d be traded or released before the start of the regular season. In the meantime, Jimmy G, still rehabbing from the offseason surgery to his throwing shoulder that had derailed earlier trade scenarios, was spending his late-July and early-August days throwing passes to Cam Bustos, who worked in the team’s health and performance department. Garoppolo conducted his daily hour-long routine on a turf field behind a set of bleachers, west of the practice fields where the rest of the 49ers were getting ready for the season. It was a literal sideshow. At times, curious fans at the top of the bleachers turned their backs to the action and instead observed Garoppolo zipping balls to Bustos, shouting their encouragement. Teammates coming to and from practice walked right past their former starting quarterback, dapping him up as he got his arm ready for his next NFL home.

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It was Lance’s show, and Shanahan didn’t really have a Plan B. The 49ers had signed former Eagles backup Nate Sudfield to a fully guaranteed one-year, $2 million contract in March, but it was clearly Lance or bust. And so far at camp, there were plenty of moments that suggested “bust.” That the second-year player might not fulfill his promise wasn’t a popular opinion in those parts. The fan base had embraced Lance’s potential with a protective fervor, even before he was drafted, and many reacted angrily to any suggestion of his struggles. When I’d reported over the offseason about the young quarterback’s arm fatigue issues, the blowback on social media and elsewhere had been intense and sustained. Shanahan, it could be reasonably surmised, also was not a fan of such storylines. Yet, when I caught up to him as he walked to his office after a spirited training camp practice, he confronted the accuracy question without deflecting or equivocating. Yes, Shanahan conceded, Lance’s accuracy was a concern. The coach attributed much of the problem to the fact that Lance was often asked to throw on the move in high school and college. The faster one travels, Shanahan explained, the trickier it is to make the ball go where you intend it to go. He didn’t portray the issue as insurmountable, but he also didn’t act like it wasn’t a thing. What Shanahan said next opened a portal into his mind, revealing something foundational about how he viewed the game. All quarterbacks, he said, have weaknesses that must be navigated and mitigated. The key is to build a team around the quarterback capable of reducing his massive burden, and of compensating for his failings in key moments.

The conversation veered into an assessment of how much is put on an NFL quarterback and how many obstacles appear — especially in the postseason, when games tighten up and every play can feel monumental. In those settings, Shanahan felt, asking the quarterback to “do everything,” to be the primary driving force whose actions determine victory and defeat, is typically not a winning strategy. He referenced the previous January’s 13-10 playoff victory over Matt LaFleur and the Packers at Lambeau Field, and how much of Green Bay’s operation revolved around Aaron Rodgers. “That’s why they don’t win,” he said. Similarly, Peyton Manning, a quarterback he believed had the greatest-ever command of the position, had suffered a slew of postseason disappointments during his career, albeit while capturing two championships. “There are just too many variables you have to deal with that are difficult to predict,” Shanahan said, citing Bill Belichick’s strategic blueprint for consecutive Patriots playoff victories over the Colts in 2003 and ‘04 — when he had defenders play tight, hyper-physical coverage on Indy receivers and dared the officials to penalize them repeatedly — as an example. “It’s too much on one guy. There can be (bad) weather, injuries, so many things. … The only quarterback who has ever been able to handle all of it, in my opinion, is Tom (Brady). For anyone else, you need to give him some help.”

The overarching point was this: Shanahan was accustomed to managing his quarterback’s imperfections and crafting a plan to overcome them. He fully anticipated having to do so with Lance, but for critics to focus only on the second-year player was to ignore how Shanahan had navigated the previous four and a half seasons with Garoppolo, who sometimes struggled going through his progressions, seeing the field the way Shanahan wanted him to, and throwing deep, among other shortcomings. The 49ers had been to a Super Bowl and come close to reaching another because of Jimmy G and in spite of him. Shanahan and Lynch had constructed a talented, well-rounded team whose players valued attention to detail, selflessness, and relentless physicality and effort. Because of the two decision-makers’ belief in the soundness of that approach, they’d pivoted to a model of trusting a young quarterback on a rookie contract to be good enough to allow the 49ers’ comprehensive excellence to prevail. It wasn’t a bad plan, assuming Lance could find some consistency. And if he couldn’t? Well, the model was still sustainable. The coach and GM would be proven right, though in a way they never could never have anticipated during training camp.

The first public clue that Shanahan was losing faith in Lance came in late August, when the 49ers made the shocking announcement that Garoppolo was coming back. Shanahan and Lynch tried to spin it as a signing of convenience: lacking more enticing options, Garoppolo had agreed to a revised one-year contract that reduced his base salary to a fully guaranteed $6.5 million (with up to another $8.95 million in incentives) and included a provision that he couldn’t be traded or given the franchise tag after the season. Spin aside, the 49ers’ interest in approaching Garoppolo with an offer clearly represented a change of thinking, given that the team’s former starter hadn’t been asked to attend meetings or film-watching sessions during the preseason and had yet to even meet first-year quarterbacks coach Brian Griese. Jimmy G’s return to the roster as a backup was sure to put more pressure on Lance, but Shanahan clearly wasn’t averse to taking that risk. It was, quite plainly, a hedge. It aligned with something a former 49ers assistant coach had predicted to me months earlier: “I think Kyle is just trying to figure out some way to bring Jimmy back, somehow, because he knows it could go really bad with Trey.”

The day after the Garoppolo news broke, in a move that attracted far less attention, the 49ers included Sudfeld in their final roster cuts to reach the 53-man limit. Garoppolo’s return may have made such a transaction seem inevitable, but there was a twist: Shanahan and Lynch kept three quarterbacks on the roster, which had not been their intent at the start of training camp. The third was a rookie they’d planned to release and then bring back onto the practice squad, allowing the Niners to keep the young quarterback in the fold while paying him very little, and to use the valuable roster spot on a player at another position. However, the rookie — whom the 49ers had selected with the 262nd and final pick of the draft — had impressed Shanahan from the moment he arrived in Santa Clara. More to the point, he’d unleashed a few bold and savvy passes during the preseason that Shanahan feared would be noticed by other teams’ coaches and scouts. Shanahan felt that cutting the kid and sneaking him onto the practice squad was too risky; another team could claim him and sign him to its active roster.

So, Shanahan and Lynch decided to keep Brock Purdy on the team. Purdy’s ascent may have appeared unlikely to outsiders, but in the locker room, most people got it. He’d made a good impression in OTAs and minicamps, and, once training camp began, had made the most of his limited opportunities. Because of that, his opportunities increased. He was ultraprepared, went through his progressions faithfully, saw the field well, and exuded calm in a manner that belied his status. Best of all, he had what is known in 49ers internal parlance as “some s— in his neck.” Nearly from the outset, the 22-year-old acted like he belonged, and then some. It helped that Purdy was used to being underestimated. Growing up in Queen Creek, Ariz., he was a sports-loving kid who dreamed of playing major college football despite the improbability of that actually happening. Earning a scholarship was important to him, and not just symbolically. In 2008, the Purdys, like so many American families, had their lives upended by the housing crash caused by the subprime mortgage crisis. His father, Shawn, a former minor league pitcher, and mother, Carrie, struggled to make things work while prioritizing the athletic pursuits of Brock, younger brother Chubba, and older sister Whittney.

“At the time, I didn’t really understand what was going on,” recalled Purdy, who was 8. “But I knew we lost everything, and we were moving from house to house, and my dad had to open up his business in another name. And all that stuff, I didn’t understand any of it. When I got through high school and (started to understand), I was like, ‘Maaaan.’ You look back and (think), ‘They put everything into us, still, even with all that.’ No matter what their situation was, they still gave all that they had to us, in terms of the time spent, my dad coaching us — everything. They showed me

what sacrifice was. They showed me what real love was.”

Whether Mike Shanahan was serving as a shadow GM for his son (that was probably overstated) or simply staying involved in the game during his golden years was a matter of some debate; he told me the main reason he liked watching practices and meetings was to keep abreast of his son’s cutting-edge schematics, which had evolved a great deal since the Washington days. Whatever the case, Mike, from afar, saw something early in Purdy that even Kyle hadn’t yet spotted. What stood out most was Purdy’s comfort and recognition of what he himself was seeing on the field. “He’s played,” Shanahan said, referring to Purdy’s 48 starts at Iowa State. In that sense, Purdy was almost the anti-Lance. Could it be that the Niners had taken a massive swing and miss — and that they’d get away with it because of the equivalent of an infield hit on an errant pitch that nicked the back of the bat?

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.