Brock Purdy sounds just like Jimmy Garoppolo realizing how close he was to beating Chiefs

Coach-talk is one thing, but player-talk is a whole different beast. You know it when you hear it. It’s uninteresting and it feels disingenuous, but it’s all we have to go off of so that means we can sink our teeth into it. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy might be new to player-talk in the media, but he’s already crushing it.

Purdy had a one-on-one with KPIX, the CBS affiliate in the Bay Area, and when talking about the Super Bowl loss, he said, “It really was there. We were a couple plays away from winning it.” 

Aside from that being the most obvious statement ever said in the history of man, given that the Super Bowl went into overtime, it sounds eerily similar to Jimmy Garappolo’s post-Super Bowl loss interviews.

Super Bowl-losing 49ers QBs sound quite a lot like one another

You can see a Super Bowl hangover coming from a mile away, but the signs come in different shapes and sizes. Last season, the Philadelphia Eagles were coming off of a Super Bowl loss, and in the offseason, we saw pictures of Jalen Hurts’ background on his phone and it was a picture of him walking off the field with red and yellow confetti falling on him. 

Initially, thoughts were that this guy was going to use this as motivation, but quickly into the season, it was clear that the Eagles, as a whole, were not having any fun. It felt like if anything went wrong it was the end of the world. That eventually came true after they started the season with a 10-1 record, but collapsed, historically, in the last two months of the season. 

The 49ers’ beast is entirely different. They took their loss in the 2022 NFC Championship game and turned it into fuel for a competitive flame whose heat could dwarf that of the sun. They put everything that they had into the season because 2023 was their year… until it ultimately wasn’t.

Purdy’s full interview was a little over six minutes, but the comments on the Super Bowl were at the 4:29 mark. His full quote is: 

“Once we got back for OTAs and stuff, rewatching the Super Bowl with Shanahan and Griese and all the guys. It’s like, Dang, it really was there. We were a couple plays away from winning it. You’ve got to learn from it. You’ve got to pick your head back up, go to work and try to go get it again. It was tough. I Still look back on it and think, we wish we coulda, woulda, but that’s life, so now we’ve got to respond.”

Maybe that is just player talk. After all, what else can you say about a close Super Bowl loss? After the 49ers' 31-20 loss to the Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV, Jimmy Garappolo had similar things to say.

Things like, “We're a young team. We've got a very bright future. We've got to take this in stride, remember this feeling,” and, “There was some plays we could have made. We usually do and we didn’t.”

It’s much different than Peyton Manning’s comments after Super Bowl XLVIII when the Denver Broncos got whomped 43-8 by the Seattle Seahawks. Manning said, “I don't know if you ever get over it. It's a difficult pill to swallow. You have to find a way to deal with it and process it, and if you can, you try and fuel it to make yourself a better team next year.”

Many of the words are the same, but the sentiment is very different. Purdy and Garappolo were definitive and demanding while Manning was sorrowful and hopeful. That kind of makes sense since their games, while ultimately having the same outcome, looked entirely different.

The thing is, the Broncos followed up their Super Bowl loss with a 2015 season where their record was 12-4. After the Jimmy’s 49ers lost in 2019, they followed up with a 2020 season where they had a 6-10 record. 

Yes, 2020 was a weird year for football, but it was weird for every single team. Adding the stress of trying to make it back to a championship onto everything else, crumbled the 49ers’ 2020 season (also a disgusting number of injuries didn’t help). 

It all starts with an offseason mindset, and Brock is telling us that their mindset is similar to 2020: that the 49ers aren’t done. Unfortunately for them, history does this thing where it repeats itself, like, all the time.