Long before 49ers rookie Brock Purdy made waves in the NFL, Philadelphia Eagles coach Nick Sirianni was already familiar with the quarterback’s game.
Thanks to a shared connection to the state of Iowa, Sirianni knows exactly what’s in store for his team in Purdy as they prepare for Sunday’s NFC Championship game.
“Just that he’s a winner,” Sirianni said Monday when asked what he knew about Purdy before this week. “Of course I always follow Iowa State and their program because I have so many college teammates and roommates who train there.”
Sirianni played college football at the University of Mount Union in the early 2000s alongside Iowa State coach Matt Campbell, who handed Purdy the reins of his offense during the quarterback’s freshman year in 2018.
Despite coming on as a third-string quarterback (sound familiar?), Purdy went on to start all four years for the Cyclones. He and Campbell led Iowa State to one of its most successful seasons ever in 2020, complete with a Fiesta Bowl win, and Purdy held 32 school records when he left the program a year later.
And Sirianni followed everything, especially when he was scouting out late-round quarterbacks.
“You saw something [Purdy] did for this program, right? Matt is obviously a great head coach, but he has a great quarterback in Brock Purdy,” Sirianni continued. And I noticed that with him, that he’s a winner.
“When you’re that close with other coaches, you have conversations back and forth — and this goes back to when Brock was at Iowa State — like, ‘Hey, what are you doing? We saw that right on tape Here, that looks good, this and that.’ The common theme of theirs has always been that we have a quarterback who can lead the way and consistently find the right spot to go with football.
“Just a playmaker.”
Sirianni left no stone unturned in his compliments to Purdy, and the quarterback lived up to those scouting reports during his time as a 49ers starter. Purdy has yet to lose a game he’s started for San Francisco, making plenty of franchise and NFL history in the process.
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His biggest challenge yet will come when he faces the high-stakes NFC No. 1-seeded Eagles at Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday.
But as Sirianni noted, Purdy knows a thing or two about winning.
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