The Brock Purdy Depravation Experiment and Other Terrible Ideas

The 49ers go full Gift of the Magi with Brock Purdy, the Bengals and Cowboys begin to plan, and Isaiah Bond is Agent 004.39.

There’s a real chance that the San Francisco 49ers will simultaneously give Brock Purdy a $275-million contract extension and trade away all of his playmakers this offseason.

If that happens, it will be like one of those cruel, misguided 19th Century nature-versus-nurture experiments. We, the trustees of the Oxbridge Theosophic Academy, have isolated an infant from all human interaction in the Tower of London, where he will subsist on nothing but weak tea and digestive biscuits until age 16, forthwith we shall fetch him to see if he instinctively knows how to fasten a cummerbund like a true gentleman.

The 49ers have already traded Deebo Samuel to the Washington Commanders for a fifth-round pick. It was a cap-and-headache saving move. Deebo issued a series of “No hard feelings, but haha I was out of shape when you really needed me last year, suckers” social media statements. The Commanders must now craft a restructured contract and an offensive role to satisfy the 29-year=old not-quite-superstar. If they do, they will be the first.

There are now murmurs that the 49ers will also trade Brandon Aiyuk, who signed a new contract after a protracted squabble last September and then tore his ACL last October. If the healthy-but-paunchy-and-always-discontented Deebo only fetched a fifth-round pick on the trade market, imagine what damaged goods with $110 million left on his contract is worth!

Meanwhile, talks have begun on Purdy’s inevitable standard rich-and-famous-quarterback contract. Extending Purdy while keeping his Legion of Superheroes together, even as they grow older and weirder, would make sense. Gutting the offensive roster, Purdy included, also makes at least thought-experiment sense. But extending Purdy while gutting the roster, well, that’s Marie Curie vodka-and-polonium cocktail stuff right there.

There has been speculation since he rose from obscurity to achieve immediate success in 2022 that Purdy was little more than Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher piloting the Starship Enterprise. Last season, when many of his playmakers were injured, Purdy proved that he was more like Ensign Ro, or perhaps Chief O’Brien. But promoting Purdy to Jordi would be pushing it.

(Feel free to leave your 49ers-to-Star-Trek-TNG-character comparisons in the comments. What’s undeniable is that Trent Baalke is a Klingon.)

Purdy finished a very respectable 11th in DYAR in 2024, both despite and because of the week-to-week availability of a patchwork of superstar teammates. It was a very Derek Carr-shaped year: a solid-not-spectacular statistical profile for a team that went bottom-up after Thanksgiving.

Purdy would be a bargain on a Baker Mayfield-sized contract. But quarterbacks who lead their teams to overtime in the Super Bowl don’t settle for Mayfield-sized contracts. He could also earn dividends on a Jalen Hurts-shaped deal if his supporting cast wasn’t currently being rewarded for their 2022-23 accomplishments. As it stands, the 49ers run the risk of going full “Gift of the Magi” on Purdy: trading away the things which make him worth keeping so they can keep him. They are running that risk at full speed.

Oh, Purdy will still have playmakers in 2025, even if they trade Aiyuk. There’s George Kittle, who is at least a full year away from turning into Zombie Travis Kelce. There’s Jauan Jennings, the pleasant surprise who was so effective last year that he could have been the Eagles’ WR3. And of course, Christian McCaffrey is sure to bounce back from the PCL injury which ended his season and the Achilles sprain which lingered through last summer and autumn. Twenty-nine year old running backs do that sort of thing all the time.

The Madden-logic move would be to trade Purdy right now, then auto-sim through the Kittle/CMC decline phase and concurrent rebuilding period. A stale morsel of viral fanfic speculates just that: the 49ers might trade Purdy to the Titans for the first-overall pick! What a scoop!

The source for this opium dream is Marissa Myers at something called The Wrightway Sports Network, which appears to be a gambling hotsheet of some sort. Myers didn’t list any sources, and her article was heavier on SEO-friendly subheaders than body paragraphs. But both Athlon and The Sporting News aggregated the sticky spitball as a “rumor,” as if it were something we heard Ian Rapoport muttering about at the JW Marriott Starbucks before he was hit in the face with a chair.

The 49ers won’t be trading Purdy for a variety of reasons, one of them being that any trade partner would face the same dilemmas the 49ers face. How good is Purdy without his Legion of Superheroes? How does a team compensate a quarterback with Top 20 talent but lots of Top 5 accomplishments? And if Kyle Shanahan no longer wants the padawan he so carefully trained in the ways of The Force, why should anyone else? Oh, and the Titans would have to sacrifice the top pick in the draft for the right to answer these questions. Early March is a tough time of year for common sense on the NFL Internet.

Aiyuk is also not going anywhere: too expensive, too risky an investment while rehabbing. With Aiyuk at 80% early in the year and Jimmy Pearsall serving as Deebo methadone, Purdy’s aging supporting cast will probably grade out around league average in 2025. There’s a strong chance that Purdy will do the same. But at Joe Burrow money.

It’s a shame that the Purdy-Titans trade is a mere click-minnow. Purdy helming a team with replacement-level talent at the skill positions would provide valuable data about the impact of a supporting cast on a quarterback’s statistical profile. Imagine using Purdy on a barren roster to precisely isolate a quarterback’s value, independent of his receivers, and use that information to build better analytical models.

Now that’s the sort of thinking that would lead a Victorian scientist to lock a child in a dungeon.

No, Mister Bond, We Expect You to RUN

I often complain about Didja Talk To questions to prospects at the Combine, as I did in the Forty Awards feature. Prospects are only given 15 minutes to speak to the press. Often, they are pulled from their podiums in under 10 minutes, even if the conversation is lively. Peppering the prospects with dead-end questions guaranteed to produce boilerplate responses not only wastes time but places the young men on their guard: you can almost see a young linebacker’s eyes glaze over when asked which teams he spoke to for the fifth time in two minutes, by reporters who probably couldn’t compose a coherent sentence about them.

How fast do you think you will run? has become the second-worst question at the Combine, and it’s gaining ground on Didja Talk To. Players speak on the day before they work out, so there is only a tiny sliver of a reporting window during which speculation about their individual 40 times is quasi-relevant. (Joe Runstuffer talked to the Jets can at least be used as content in various ways throughout the six-week draft cycle.) Apparently, some outlets run articles like “Speedy Stonehands plans to run a 4.2-second forty” in the 26 hours or so between Stonehands saying so and attempting to do so. And reporters earn money (and rack up expenses) to create such content. And so few of us decide before doing so that they would rather just walk off into the woods and never be seen again!

Which brings us to Texas wide receiver Isaiah Bond. When asked on Friday how fast he would run, Bond said “"I'm going to break the record tomorrow, for sure. I anticipate running 4.2. Or possibly, if I'm feeling great, I might run a 4.1."

Bond officially ended up with a 4.39-second result. Fans in attendance booed when his unofficial time of 4.40 seconds flashed on the screen at Lucas Oil Stadium. They must have been Eagles fans, amirite?

Bond is very fast, but that is all he is. There’s not much else in his scouting profile to get excited about: his size, production, routes, niftiness and physicality all rank in the C-tier. He’s a Day Three pick. Breaking teammate Xavier Worthy’s Combine record would have changed that, but it’s not clear by how much: Worthy looked like a potential record breaker on the field, while Bond just looked … very fast. He’s now the guy who “bragged” or “embarrassed himself” at the Combine, when he was really just keeping himself pumped up and/or having a little fun with the press pool.

Anyway, I don’t care about Bond’s forty or the Internet’s reaction to Bond’s forty. What I care about is Bond’s touchdown celebration. He leans backward like a cool customer, against the base of the field goal uprights if they are nearby, bends his elbows and tents his fingers under his chin as if brandishing, say, a Walther PPK pistol. You know: like James Bond! It’s very cool. Even the most tremulous schoolmarm would be hard-pressed to suggest that it promotes violence in any meaningful way. And yet it is very likely to draw a penalty in the NFL, which is dedicated to keeping the world safe from finger pew-pews.

Maybe Bond can come up with other 007-related touchdown celebrations: drinking vodka martinis, dodging hats thrown at him, womanizing, getting replaced by a new actor every 10 years.

Despite his ho-hum scouting profile, I hope to see Bond score some NFL touchdowns. No one should become a laughingstock because he gave a fun-if-overconfident answer to an exceedingly stupid question.

The Procrastinators Anonymous Meeting Has Been Postponed

Beware of any team that always plans to extend a contract but rarely gets around to extending a contract. They’re the NFL equivalent to smokers who plan to quit tomorrow.

The Bengals franchise-tagged Tee Higgins on Monday. Per their official statement, they made the move with “the intent of continuing to work toward a long-term deal in Cincinnati.”

Can you hear the language of failure in that statement? Intent of continuing to work toward. They plan to give it their best to see if they can somehow come closer to making it happen. Help them out, Master Yoda.

The Bengals also tagged Higgins last year. His guaranteed salary and cap number in 2025 as a twice-tagged wide receiver is $26.2 million. That’s cap space and ready cash that are no longer available for the Ja’Marr Chase and Trey Hendrickson extensions that have not quite entered the intent to plan stage. The Bengals are costing themselves money in their effort to stay solvent. They’re paying what amounts to credit card late fees that they cannot really afford.

Bengals cornerback Mike Hilton, a free agent in a few days, is peace-ing out of the whole situation. “New opportunities always present themselves,” he posted on social media. Hinton is 31 years old but still a capable starter. He would likely have been low on any team’s free agent agenda, but the Bengals are still hoping to continue to work toward the top of their agenda, so why wait? And so a bad defense loses a useful veteran who helped the franchise reach a Super Bowl.

Meanwhile in Dallas, Dak Prescott’s cap number for 2025 is $89.6 million at presstime. That’s about 30% of their cap space for next year. But don’t despair: the Cowboys can cut that figure nearly in half with a “simple restructuring” in which they turn most of Prescott’s salary ($47.8 million) into a bonus and amortize that money across multiple years, including an imaginary void year or two. Prescott’s services are extra-expensive because the Cowboys dragged their feet on his last extension and had to jerry-rig a contract structure that wedged their quarterback under the 2024 cap.

Once the Cowboys perform that routine bit of accounting on Prescott’s contract, they will have enough cap space to be active in free agency. They won’t actually be active in free agency, because Jerry Jones believes he was pauperized by the price of eggs last year (and also that eggs are now free), but it’s nice to pretend that they could be. Whether the Cowboys restructure Prescott in time for free agency is anyone’s guess; this is a team that nearly forgot to hire a head coach last month.

In other Cowboys news, team insider Calvin Watkins reports that talks with Micah Parsons about an extension have finally begun. They are still in the “early stages,” per the report, but at least they are not in the “intent to continue to work” stage.

Parsons became eligible for an extension this time last year. His deal should already be old news, but the Cowboys were busy haggling with Prescott and CeeDee Lamb last winter, spring and back-to-school shopping season. Parsons has been preternaturally patient about an extension, to the point where he cost himself money by playing for far less than his value last year. It sounds like both parties are likely to fall asleep at the poker table during these negotiations. But Parsons’ agent doesn’t get paid unless he nudges his client.

The Cowboys cannot really proceed with Parsons until they tidy up the Prescott situation; this would be a procedural nothingburger for most teams but could be a bottleneck for the Cowboys. (The Bengals might freeze like a deer on the turnpike under the circumstances.)

To give credit where credit is due, the Cowboys did manage to sign Osa Odighizuwa before being forced to franchise tag a capable non-star of a defensive tackle who should never have even been considered a candidate for a franchise tag. Last offseason, Odighizuwa would have signed with the Commanders without the Cowboys noticing. Lamb’s contract has also been restructured. Jerrah clearly had his All-Bran on Tuesday.

Let’s contrast the Bengals and Cowboys with the Rams for a moment. Matthew Stafford wanted more money. The Rams, shrewdly, do not want to pay for his decline years, which are coming soon. They allowed Stafford to fool around on the trade market, like a husband with a growing bald spot who thinks his still-dewy college girlfriends will parachute into his lap once he updates his Facebook status. Lo and behold, Stafford’s suitors looked unpleasantly liked the Raiders and Giants. But the Rams had a restructured contract that both sides could live with ready to sign.

Those of us in the media spent a few weeks, and nearly killed each other, chasing the unthrown tennis ball of a Stafford trade. But focusing on what didn’t happen is missing the point. The Rams and Stafford handled their business like business, or like the French handle marriages. They even got a “minor” $57-million Alaric Jackson deal done while Stafford and Tom Brady snuggled beside the hearth. No crying poor. No beginning to commence to start working toward anything. No service fees or surcharges. Just a playoff team keeping its roster intact.

Let’s end this segment by honoring Cowboys offensive lineman Zack Martin, who plans to announce his retirement on the day this column is published. Martin was a seven-time All Pro who will breeze into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In addition to being an all-time great, he’s a supporting character in one of the all-time great Cowboys front-office dramas: Stephen Jones may or may not have had to wrestle the Johnny Manziel card from Jerrah’s hand and replace it with a Martin card on draft day in 2014. (He probably did not, but every account of the Martin-over-Manziel decision describes a tense father-son showdown.)

And now for a stirring tribute to Martin by renowned orator Brian Schottenheimer, who was lobbed an opportunity to extol Martin’s greatness during his Combine press conference. For accurate results, read the following with lots of Bill Lumburgh pauses:

Yeah, I think [Martin is] a special, special person. I've only been around him for a couple years, but the way he works, the way that he puts his body on the line, the way he goes through the process from Monday through Saturday, that people don’t realize, to go out there and perform at the level that he did. He'll be in Canton here in the next couple of years. If I don't get an invitation, I'll be pissed. Hell, we might be playing in the game. You never know. But special man, incredible player, but a better person.”

Oops, it sounds like Schottenheimer was caught off guard by the question about Martin’s retirement. And may not know his star guard all that well after coaching him for two years. And cannot think on his feet adroitly enough to come up with an anecdote instead of wandering off-message and musing about what the preseason schedule will look like in 2031. (For contrast, imagine what either Harbaugh brother might say about a retiring Hall of Famer.)

It’s time for Stephen Jones to wrestle a few more things out of his father’s hands.