There is Patrick Mahomes, the defining quarterback of his generation.
There is Aaron Rodgers, a four-time MVP and future first-ballot Hall of Famer.
There are Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen, the spectacular dual-threat stars who have spent years battling for MVP awards and AFC supremacy.
Joe Burrow is there. Jalen Hurts. Justin Herbert. Matthew Stafford.
And sitting above every one of them?
Brock Purdy.
Yes, that Brock Purdy.
Mr. Irrelevant himself, the 262nd and final selection of the 2022 NFL Draft, owns the highest career passer rating among current NFL quarterbacks with at least 1,000 pass attempts.
Purdy: 104.0.
Rodgers and Jackson: 102.2.
Burrow: 101.1.
Mahomes: 100.8.
That’s not a typo.
Four years after every NFL team — including the San Francisco 49ers — spent nearly three full days passing on him, Purdy has put together a statistical résumé that places him atop one of the most star-studded lists in football.
And maybe it’s time we stopped being so surprised by him.
Of course, the arguments against Purdy’s numbers are familiar by now.
He plays for Kyle Shanahan. He inherited an offense filled with elite playmakers. He wasn’t asked to rescue a hopeless franchise. He stepped into a machine specifically designed to make a quarterback’s life easier.
All of that is fair.
It also doesn’t explain away 104.0.
Jimmy Garoppolo played in Shanahan’s offense, too. His career passer rating is 97.6.
That’s very good.
It’s also more than six points below Purdy.
And consider the company Purdy is keeping.
Mahomes, who has spent his career redefining what is possible at the position, checks in at 100.8. Burrow, one of the league’s most precise and polished passers, is at 101.1. Jackson, a multiple-time MVP, is at 102.2.
Purdy is ahead of all of them.
The further down the list you go, the more remarkable it becomes.
Dak Prescott: 98.3.
Jared Goff: 96.8.
Justin Herbert: 96.3.
Josh Allen: 94.4.
Matthew Stafford: 92.4.
Baker Mayfield: 91.2.
These aren’t journeymen being used to pad Purdy’s résumé. They are Super Bowl champions, MVPs, Pro Bowlers, No. 1 overall draft picks and some of the most gifted quarterbacks of their era.
Purdy wasn’t supposed to belong in that group.
He certainly wasn’t supposed to lead it.
That’s what continues to make his story one of the NFL’s strangest.
The 49ers entered the 2022 season with Purdy buried on the depth chart behind Trey Lance, the quarterback for whom San Francisco had traded a haul of draft picks, and Garoppolo, the veteran who had already taken the franchise to a Super Bowl.
Purdy was the third-stringer.
The developmental guy.
The last pick in the draft.
Then injuries happened, Purdy got his chance and one of the most unlikely quarterback careers in recent NFL history began.
At first, the success felt almost temporary.
Surely defensive coordinators would figure him out.
Surely the limitations that caused every NFL team to pass on him repeatedly would eventually appear.
Surely this was Shanahan’s system more than Purdy’s talent.
Except Purdy kept completing passes.
He kept winning games.
He kept producing.
And eventually the sample size became too large to dismiss.
That’s why the 1,000-attempt threshold matters.
We’re no longer talking about a quarterback who caught the league by surprise for a few Sundays. Purdy has thrown enough NFL passes to move beyond the small-sample curiosity stage.
The efficiency has endured.
None of this means Purdy is the best quarterback in football.
If you’re starting a franchise tomorrow, Mahomes is still going before him. Allen, Burrow and Jackson would have plenty of supporters, too. Quarterback evaluation involves considerably more than one statistic, and passer rating itself is an imperfect measurement.
But that’s almost beside the point.
The remarkable part isn’t that Purdy must now be declared better than Mahomes or Jackson.
It’s that we’re even having a conversation in which his name appears alongside theirs.
NFL teams have spent decades trying to solve the quarterback position.
They trade multiple first-round picks to move up in drafts. They hand out contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They study arm strength, release times, processing speed, footwork and every measurable imaginable.
San Francisco did all of that, too.
The 49ers famously traded three first-round picks to move up and draft Lance third overall in 2021, believing they had secured their quarterback of the future.
A year later, with the very last selection of the draft, they took Purdy.
One was the massive investment.
The other was an afterthought.
Guess which one became the franchise quarterback?
There may be no better reminder of just how unpredictable quarterback evaluation remains.
Purdy doesn’t have Mahomes’ improvisational magic. He doesn’t have Allen’s overwhelming physical tools or Jackson’s breathtaking running ability. He doesn’t arrive with the pedigree of Burrow, the No. 1 overall pick who led LSU to a national championship.
What he has done is play quarterback efficiently at an extraordinarily high level.
Over and over again.
Long enough now that the numbers demand to be taken seriously.
Maybe someday someone will pass him. With a group this talented, it wouldn’t be surprising.
But right now, line up the active NFL quarterbacks with at least 1,000 attempts and look at the top.
Mahomes isn’t there.
Burrow isn’t there.
Jackson isn’t there.
Rodgers isn’t there.
The name at No. 1 is the one nobody would have imagined when the 2022 NFL Draft finally reached pick No. 262.
Brock Purdy.
Mr. Irrelevant has become impossible to ignore.