49ers All-Time Top 5 QBs Part II: Pretty, Pretty, Purdy Good.

Million Dollar Backfields, postseason heartbreaks and complicated succession plans: a 49ers tradition since the 1940s!

Steve Young and Joe Montana took center stage in Part I. Now it’s time for all the guys who couldn’t win the big game despite superstar supporting casts or whose merits are defined in comparison to their immediate predecessors. It turns out 49ers quarterbacks have been dealing with such narratives since not long after the end of World War II.

3. Y.A. Tittle

When Tittle was a two-way quarterback/safety for LSU, he intercepted a Charlie Conerly pass against Ole Miss in November of 1947, only for the intended receiver to rip his belt while attempting to make the tackle. There were no elastic waistbands or stretch fabrics in 1947; Tittle’s belt served a necessary gravity-offsetting function.

Tittle told the tale of his pants falling down many, many times; it was apparently a staple of his banquet-circuit patter. Dan McQuade, writing for Deadspin, remembers reading the tale in The Sports Hall of Shame, a popular paperback about on-field bloopers from the 1980s. “If my pants hadn’t fallen, I’d have scored easily,” Tittle stated in the book, per McQuade. “It was really an embarrassing moment. There I was down to my jock strap in front of 50,000 people. I kept asking my teammates to surround me, but they didn’t help me a damn bit. They were all laughing so hard they couldn’t do anything. Everybody was getting such a chuckle out of it except me.”

“I had to stop and hitch up my britches, or I’d have stumbled. That’s when the Rebels nailed me,” Tittle said in his memoir, according to his Washington Post obituary. “Goodbye ballgame!”

Such tales tend to grow taller over the years. Rick Cleveland, writing for Mississippi Today in 2017, interviewed two of the Ole Miss players who were on the field for that 20-18 Rebels victory over Tittle’s Tigers. “Y.A.’s pants never went past his knees,” according to Farley “Fish” Salmon. “And he sure wasn’t about to score a touchdown.”

“I was in a little bit of a quandary,” according to Barney Poole, who claimed to have ultimately made the tackle. “I mean, here I come to make the tackle and I’m laughing because it’s so funny. And I’m thinking: Where do I hit him? Coach Vaught never told me how to tackle a guy with his pants down.”

Tittle said his pants fell all the way down when he tried to stiff-arm his tackler, but Poole said that there was no stiff-arm nor much of a tackle. “Tittle was pretty much going down on his own.”

In some retellings, the loss cost LSU a shot at the Cotton Bowl. But Ole Miss would finish 9-2 and go to something called the Delta Bowl (airlines must have gotten into bowl sponsorship early!) while the Tigers went 5-3-1; Tittle led LSU to a tie in the Cotton Bowl the previous year, and the seasons may have been mashed together over the decades.

As you might imagine, there’s no video from the game, so we cannot quantify how close Tittle was to a game-winning touchdown or the droopiness of his drawers. But the tale does foreshadow a career of championship near-misses, Just So stories and indelible images.

The Lions drafted Tittle sixth overall in 1948. Tittle instead opted to play instead for the AAFC’s Baltimore Colts, coached by Packers passing great Cecil Isbell. The Colts joined the NFL in a merger, then folded; our current Colts are a different franchise. Tittle became draft-eligible again when the Colts were dispersed, and the 49ers, having won a coin flip with two other teams with the same record, chose him third overall.

The 49ers, themselves AAFC refugees, were coached by Buck Shaw and quarterbacked by Frankie Albert, one of the stars of the rival league.

Training camp under Buck Shaw was different from anything I had ever experienced as a pro. With the exception of the 1950 season, when the 49ers held a bleak 3-9 record, San Francisco had been a winning team. True, they had never won a league championship, but they were always close behind those great Cleveland teams. The 49ers demonstrated a winning spirit, Buck Shaw gave the team confidence, and Frankie Albert recorded victories.

Coach Shaw coached his ballclub with kid gloves. He was truly a gentleman - dapper, polished, and soft-spoken. His roughest language consisted of, "Damn it to hell!" But when those words were spoken, players who were not giving it their all quickly began to do so.

Shaw had a casual approach to coaching. He was well organized and commanded respect but never resorted to the driving, sweating and cursing tactics that other coaches used. He had the ability of getting his ballplayers to rise to the occasion without painful tongue-lashings, punishing wind sprints, or annoying bed checks. He created an atmosphere of relaxation, but nobody ever took advantage of Buck. He may not have always had the best players in the league, but he achieved maximum results with the men that he had.

I always felt that my best years as a quarterback and my effectiveness as a football player were under the regime of Buck Shaw (1951-1954). After Buck left San Francisco, the coaching style became rigid, disciplined and controlled. I missed him very much. – Tittle, from his memoir Nothing Comes Easy (via SFGate, October 2009)

Tittle slowly took the starting job from Albert over a period of three years. The 49ers went 9-3 in 1953 and 7-4-1 in 1954, when Tittle, Joe Perry, Hugh McElhenny and John Henry Johnson were dubbed The Million Dollar Backfield. But the NFL was a 12-team league with no playoffs back then, just a single championship between the winners of the East and West divisions. Second place got the 49ers nowhere.

As Tittle stated above, Shaw left after the 1954 season, and the 49ers tailed off. Albert later returned as head coach, and the 1957 49ers went 8-4, tying the Lions for the West Division title. A playoff game would determine who faced the Browns for the NFL title.

The 49ers took a 24-7 halftime lead. They extended it to 27-7 after a 71-yard McElhenney run to set up a field goal. Fans even lined up for tickets to the NFL Championship Game. But Tittle threw three second-half interceptions, helping Tobin Rote (subbing for injured Bobby Layne) lead a stunning comeback for a 31-27 Lions victory.

The details of the fourth quarter of that game are a blur. Sources about Tittle and the 49ers rarely dwell in them. Maybe it was too painful. Maybe too many fans were in the ticket line and writers were busy doing what some of us did at halftime of the Patriots-Falcons Super Bowl. Maybe I just encountered too many paywalls during my research of a football game from 70 years ago.

Or maybe it was food poisoning. A nearby high school marching band was enlisted to perform at halftime, and 49ers management decided to treat them to lunch, ordering 200 sandwiches: some of them deviled egg, others egg-and-olive. Yes, egg sandwiches, prepared in advance in an era of spotty refrigeration and left out in the open air for an indeterminate amount of time. This was a time, of course, when pizza was a daring ethnic food.

Welp, staphylococcus tried to keep them off the field, but the marching band refused to yield. The next day, the San Francisco Examiner revealed that as many as 50 attendees were hospitalized (the number was later lowered to 29) and that city inspectors courageously seized three sandwiches as evidence on the day when what was left of The Million Dollar Backfield died.

The 49ers drafted John Brodie third overall in 1957; he started one game during that doomed season. Red Hickey replaced Albert as head coach in 1959. Hickey wanted to run a shotgun offense that was somewhere between the ancient A-formation and the modern Wildcat. The aging, plodding Tittle had no place in such a system. The 49ers drafted scrambler Billy Kilmer to platoon with Brodie in 1961. They traded Tittle to the Giants, where he would be reunited with college nemesis Charley Conerly and become the very symbol of a devastating championship near-miss.

“Y.A. Tittle would take the snap and sprint back, never backpedal, always the same number of steps, always the same number of yards, then plant that rear foot and fire the ball. It always arrived in the right place at the precise instant I came open. Y.A.’s passing routine was so exactly calibrated that, after about a half hour of practice, he’d have literally dug a hole with the right foot that he planted before the throw. Sometimes, we had to move to a new spot on the field.” – Giants teammate Frank Gifford, from Tittle’s memoir.

Tittle’s four years in New York overshadowed his 49ers career, for a variety of reasons (MVP awards, championship-game appearances, market size, increased football popularity). But he was an outstanding player for a team that captured the imaginations of fans at a time when nationwide professional sports were still gaining a toehold on the West Coast.

4. John Brodie

Brodie, a Stanford star like his coach Frankie Albert, started one game as a rookie for the cursed fourth quarter collapse/nasty egg sandwiches 1957 Niners. He earned the opening day starting job in 1958 but ended up rotating with Y.A. Tittle, who took back the job and held it through 1959. New coach Red Hickey then re-inserted Brodie, traded Tittle, and drafted scrambler Billy Kilmer to platoon with Brodie in a shotgun offense. The platoon system fooled no one (Kilmer rarely threw, Brodie never ran), and Hickey had to scrap the system after Kilmer took his car for a drunken late-night swim, suffering gruesome injuries which robbed him of his mobility.

Brodie severely injured his throwing arm in his own auto accident in 1963, though Brodie was (by all accounts) sober at the time. The 49ers, coached by Jack Christiansen, were terrible, and their fans often poured beer on players as they left the field. "Sometimes they didn't bother to take the beer out of the cans," Brodie once recalled. "Finally we had to put up a Cyclone fence to protect ourselves from their hardware."

Well, it’s not like they were booing Santa Claus or something terrible like that.

Anyway, Brodie became more of a touch passer after the injury. The 49ers improved, and Brodie used the AFL/NFL bidding war of the mid-1960s to secure a massive $750,000 five-year contract from the 49ers.

Brodie also got into Scientology. Waaaaayyyyyy into Scientology.

Let’s not delve too deeply into that.

"Brodie is a quarterback who can do everything a quarterback has to do pretty well. He can throw short with reasonable accuracy, he can throw far enough and he scrambles decently. The problem with John is that he isn't great at anything" – Bob Oates, Street & Smith’s Football Yearbook, 1965.

Brodie led the NFL in yards and touchdowns in 1965 but still found himself getting yanked from the lineup now and then in favor of Steve Spurrier or George Mira in 1966. (Remember: in 1960s football, high yardage totals often meant that a team was playing from behind too often, not that the quarterback was having a phenomenal year.) Dick Nolan took over as the 49ers coach in 1968, and Brodie again led the NFL in yardage for a .500-ish team.

Finally, in 1970, everything came together. Nolan’s 49ers finished 10-3-1. The 35-year old Brodie led the NFL in yardage, touchdowns and efficiency rating, won the MVP award, and led the 49ers to their first NFL playoff victory ever against the Purple People Eaters on an icy Minnesota afternoon.

Last year was the first in its 21 years of NFL existence that a San Francisco team had fought it out all the way and avoided the choke that has given the city a loser's reputation in professional sports. It was as strong and dramatic a finish as any in recent seasons. After dropping a "must" game to the Los Angeles Rams at Kezar Stadium 30-13, the 49ers had to win their remaining three regular-season games in order to stay in contention for the division title. In the saloons and salons of Baghdad-by-the-Bay, the faithless winced and waited for "El Foldo," which blows into town as regularly as the Pacific fog. Not to worry. The 49ers came from behind in all three games, surprising not only their fans but themselves … "Brodie has always been a good quarterback," Coach Dick Nolan argues stoutly. "Last season he was a great one. The 49ers were a better ball club, stronger in almost every department. But it was John's consistency that brought us the division championship."

More than that, Brodie's cool self-assurance shored up a club that in the past had been undercut by self-doubt. When the 49ers journeyed to Minnesota for the NFC's interdivisional playoff against the Vikings, few gave them a chance …. The thermometer read 8° just before kickoff, but a bright, California-style sun shone on the hillocks of snow in the end zones. While the Viking fans warmed themselves with schnapps and visions of Miami, Brodie came on with his own central heating, courtesy of [L. Ron] Hubbard. Wearing a short-sleeved jersey and appearing impervious to the cold, he hit on 16 of 32 passes for 201 yards and one touchdown, then ran another in himself for the clincher late in the fourth quarter. Final score: 49ers 17, Vikes 14. "We beat them at their own game," Brodie exulted afterward. "Hard-nosed defense and a balanced offense that never really exploded. But, by gum, we popped loud enough to be heard on the scoreboard at the right times." – Attributed to SI Staff, perhaps because Tex Maule did not want his name on a profile with lots of skeptical Scientology quips, September 20, 1971.

Brodie led the 49ers back to the playoffs in 1971. His arm failing him, he gave way to Spurrier in 1972, though he returned to lead a late-season comeback against the Vikings and earn the start in a playoff loss against the Cowboys. He retired after the 1973 season.

Brodie was a popular subject of Hall of Fame debates in the past. Older columnists and football historians were very protective of 1960s stars when I started writing about the NFL over 20 years ago. That protective streak often calcified into Old players rule, new players drool, and stats are for losers you whippersnapper.

Seriously. If you read the Pro Football Research Association’s Coffin Corner publications in the early 2000s, you would swear that the 1978 rule changes stole the PFRA’s lunch money and that statistical analysis ran off with their wives. Brodie, who retired fourth on the all-time passing yardage list, was for some folks the poster child for a forgotten great who modern fans just could not appreciate because his stats no longer looked good.

Careful readers of the profile above will note that there are a lot of problems with Brodie’s Hall of Fame candidacy, such as it is/was. For most of his career, his own coaches weren’t very enamored of him. Nor were 49ers fans. Nor was Street & Smith’s. Nor were All-Pro or Pro Bowl selectors, who mostly ignored him.

“Some critics said Brodie had trouble reading defenses,” wrote John Maxyunk in the Quarterback Abstract. “Others thought he could be pressured into mistakes, and some questioned his dedication.” Maxyunk only devotes three paragraphs to Brodie.

As for 1970: that was the AFL-NFL merger year. It came at the end of a period of rapid expansion, when there were a lot of grossly mismanaged franchises kicking around. (The worst of today’s teams have nothing on the Saints, Broncos, Patriots and other teams of that era.) The 1970 season sticks out like a sore thumb from Brodie’s career.

Brodie was a mid-tier starting quarterback for a long time. If he played today, we’d argue about whether he should be replaced every offseason and criticize his contract. In fact, he would fit in rather squarely among …

5. (Tie) Jeff Garcia, Jimmy Garoppolo, Brock Purdy

Jeff Garcia weighed just 195 pounds when he left San Jose State. The NFL ignored him, so he signed with the CFL’s Calgary Stampeders. He started his Canadian career in a controversy with Doug Flutie, the last quarterback on earth anyone ever wanted to face in a controversy. Flutie moved on to the Toronto Argonauts after failing to lead the Stampeders to the Grey Cup in 1996. Garcia won the CFL’s Most Outstanding Player award in 1997, then led the Stampeders to a Grey Cup in 1998.

The 49ers signed the 28-year-old Garcia to back up Steve Young in 1999. Young suffered an early-season concussion. Garcia was inconsistent as his replacement, getting yanked in favor of Steve Stenstrom for one stretch. The 49ers finished 4-12.

Bill Walsh, now the 49ers' GM, signed Rick Mirer and drafted Gio Carmazzi and Tim Rattay in 2000. Garcia held onto the starting job and threw for 4,278 yards and 31 touchdowns, finishing second in the NFL in DYAR and ending up near the top of the list you saw in the Steve Young essay. The 49ers, with Jerry Rice and Terrell Owens headlining their offense, finished 6-10. Their defense, as you might imagine (or remember), was remarkably bad.

Rice left in 2001. Poor Garcia only had prime T.O. and Garrison Hearst to work with! But the 49ers defense improved, lifting the team to 12-4. Garcia finished fourth in the NFL in DYAR, throwing 32 touchdown passes. Brett Favre’s Packers knocked the 49ers out in the first round of the playoffs.

Garcia had another capable year in 2002, finishing seventh in DYAR. The 49ers went 10-6 and beat the Giants in the first round of the playoffs, with Garcia leading a comeback from a 38-13 third-quarter deficit. But the 49ers then got smoked by Jon Gruden’s Buccaneers. Garcia threw three interceptions and lost one of three fumbles in the playoff defeat.

Walsh had stepped down as the 49ers’ top executive by then. Dennis Erickson replaced Walsh disciple Steve Mariucci after the 2002 playoff loss. Erickson was not a dyed-in-the-wool West Coast Offense evangelist, and while he kept much of Mariucci’s staff, he preferred a more vertical passing attack.

Garcia was ill-suited to Erickson’s offense. He played poorly early in the 2003 season. Owens threw a sideline fit during a loss to the Vikings, taking pains after the game to praise Rattay for playing well in relief of Garcia. A feud simmered. Garcia called T.O.’s flareup a “sickness” that could spread through the locker room. The pair nominally patched things up after a few weeks, but Garcia continued to struggle, and he gave way to Rattay at times due to injuries.

After the season, T.O. made homophobic remarks about Garcia in a Playboy interview. The 49ers traded T.O. to the Eagles in a protracted imbroglio that also involved the Ravens. The team then released Garcia, who began a third career as a popular and sometimes successful backup/challenger for hire. The 49ers, one of the NFL’s most glamorous franchises for nearly a quarter-century, rapidly plunged into seven years of irrelevance.

Jimmy Garoppolo was a draftnik binkie out of Eastern Illinois in 2014. I remember him arriving at Senior Bowl week, fresh from a star turn at the Shrine Bowl: he was one of the stars of the week and the worst-kept secret of the draft class. The Patriots selected him in the second round of the 2014 draft. Tom Brady was about to turn 37 years old and appeared to be on the decline from his 2007-11 peak, so drafting a successor made some sense.

Brady did not decline. But he was accused of tampering with footballs in the 2015 playoffs …

WE WILL NOT BE DISCUSSING DEFLATEGATE IN THE COMMENTS. VIOLATORS WILL BE GIVEN THE STINK EYE.

.. so Garoppolo, after two years on the bench, was named the Patriots starter through Brady’s four-game suspension in 2016. Garoppolo threw four touchdown passes in two victories, but he suffered a shoulder injury, forcing Jacoby Brissett to finish his long-term substitute gig.

Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch, who had just taken over as the 49ers’ showrunners that year, traded for Garoppolo in October of 2017. The 49ers, who went 1-10 with Brian Hoyer and C.J. Beathard at quarterback, went 5-0 under Garoppolo down the stretch. Lynch rewarded Garoppolo with a $137-million contract. Garoppolo tore his ACL early in the 2018 season.

The 49ers added rookies Deebo Samuel and Nick Bosa to their roster in 2019; George Kittle and some other young stars were already there. Garoppolo suddenly became the game manager for a stacked team. The 49ers went 12-4, with Garoppolo finishing 12th in the NFL in DVOA.

Garoppolo threw just 27 passes in a pair of 2019 playoff victories, which made him look a little like a tyke clutching the steering wheel from daddy’s lap. The 49ers led the Chiefs 20-10 in the Super Bowl, but Garoppolo wilted when Patrick Mahomes staged a late comeback: he overthrew wide-open Emmanuel Sanders, took a fourth-down sack and threw a game-clinching interception in the fourth quarter.

Garoppolo was in and out of the lineup in 2020 due to a series of ankle injuries. Backups C.J. Beathard and Nick Mullens appeared to outplay him at times. The 49ers traded a bundle of draft picks to move up and select Trey Lance in 2021. But Garoppolo held off Lance, stayed mostly healthy and finished 10th in DYAR in 2021, leading the even-more-stacked 49ers (now featuring Trent Williams and Brandon Aiyuk) back to the playoffs, where they reached the NFC Championship Game.

Garoppolo played through a shoulder injury in the 2021 postseason. He underwent surgery that offseason. Shanahan named Lance the starter. The 49ers tried to trade Garoppolo, to no avail. Just before the start of the 2022 season, Garoppolo took a pay cut to stay with the 49ers. And it’s a good thing for the team that he did. Lance suffered a season-ending ankle injury early in the year, and Garoppolo led the 49ers – now also featuring Christian McCaffrey – to seven wins before suffering a foot injury.

Brock Purdy, a four-year starter at Iowa State, was the final player taken in the 2022 draft. He was not really overlooked by draftniks; it’s not like folks who cover the draft lose track of Big-12 passing leaders. It’s just that Purdy did not look like anything special in college. The 49ers themselves didn’t act as though they had struck gold. They had invested heavily in Lance and decided to keep Garoppolo on a reduced salary as an insurance policy. Purdy narrowly beat Nate Sudfeld for the third-string role.

Purdy replaced the injured Garoppolo in 2022 and went 5-0 down the stretch, just as Garoppolo had done in his 49ers debut. Purdy threw three touchdown passes in a playoff win over the Seahawks, then game-managed a 19-12 victory over the Cowboys. He then suffered a UCL injury when he was sacked by Haason Reddick early in what became an NFC Championship Game blowout by the Eagles. Off-the-street backup Josh Johnson suffered a concussion in the same game — Garoppolo, deactivated and too injured to play, was the QB3 — forcing Purdy to mop up the loss, even though he could barely throw.

Purdy and Lance nominally competed for the 49ers starting job in 2023. But it became obvious as camp unfolded that Lance was heading to the all-time draft-bust dustbin. (Bustbin?) Purdy won the job easily, sending Lance into exile. The 49ers, stacked to the teeth with talent and smarting from what they felt was an unfair test at the end of the 2022 playoffs, steamrolled everything in their path for most of the year. Purdy led the NFL in DYAR. The 49ers fought the Chiefs to a 19-19 tie in the Super Bowl, which was Shanahan’s cue to make one of his signature tactical errors: ignoring his analytics department by receiving the ball first and settling for a field goal in overtime.

Purdy played well for an injury-ravaged team in 2024, which brings us up to date.

Garcia, Garoppolo and Purdy all had brief stints of success with top-tier supporting casts. Garcia was extremely popular with the national media, which treated him as an underdog folk hero.

Garoppolo, by contrast, became an Internet chew toy whose training camp interception sprees always went viral; his 2021 season (again, playing through injuries) and 2022 relief effort get hand-waved or footnoted.

Purdy’s legacy will hinge on what he does once he gets paid a humongous contract. Niners fans who insist that Purdy is much, much better than Garoppolo doth protest too much at times. Both Purdy and Garoppolo led a Super Bowl loss to the Chiefs and had outstanding 2022 seasons that ended in injuries. If they played in the 1980s and our memories of the exact details (and fan perceptions) were fuzzy, no one would blink at a tie between them.

I think Garcia received too much credit for things he didn’t quite do. I think Garoppolo doesn’t get a fair shake for the things he did do. It’s too soon to give Purdy credit for what he might do. So I see little separation between these three quarterbacks with fascinating legacies. Hence the tie. Purdy could easily break the tie by leading the 49ers back to the playoffs this year.

At least we are done with the complicated legacies. Right? RIGHT???

8. Colin Kaepernick

Kaepernick fits broadly into the Garcia/Garoppolo paradigm: a brief period of Super Bowl-caliber success for a stacked team which came to a sudden and turbulent end. Like, very, VERY broadly.

9. Alex Smith

Kaepernick’s best seasons with the 49ers ranked 20th and 28th on the 49ers’ all-time quarterback DYAR list, rushing and passing combined. Smith’s best seasons ranked 30th and 32nd, with Kaepernick replacing Smith in one of those years (2011) and leading the 49ers to the Super Bowl.

10. Frankie Albert

The second-best quarterback in AAFC history, behind Otto Graham. Albert led Stanford to an undefeated season and a Rose Bowl victory, then served in the Naval Reserve during World War II (he was flat-footed), then played a year in the Pacific Coast Football League before joining the upstart hometown 49ers. We met him as Y.A. Tittle’s mentor, then his (and John Brodie’s) coach. His daughter Jane became a successful tennis player who was once Billie Jean King’s doubles partner. I’m starting to wish I didn’t devote so many words to Jimmy Garoppolo.