Giants Q&A: How did Brock Purdy fare vs. Wink Martindale's blitzing defense?
49ers quarterback Brock Purdy passes the ball during the first half of an NFL game against the Giants in Santa Clara, Calif., on Thursday. Credit: AP/Godofredo A. Vásquez
How did Brock Purdy handle the Giants’ blitzes?
Seemingly, very well.
“That’s their scheme,” Purdy said. “That’s how they’ve done things [and] they’re pretty good at it. So, going into the game, we had an idea, obviously, just on film that’s what we were going to get. They stuck to it and, yeah, it was a four-quarter game.”
Purdy completed 25 of 37 passes for 310 yards, two touchdown and no interceptions. To his two favorite receivers, George Kittle and Deebo Samuel, he completed a combined 13 passes for 219 yards. Samuel had one touchdown.
“When they’re blitzing, we can capitalize on offense with some big plays, and we had some stuff dialed up for what we were going to do when they did blitz.”
Purdy added that if the Niners weren’t on point, they knew that the Giants' blitz could make them pay. Clearly, even with a young quarterback in the 23-year-old Purdy, that was a gamble Niners coach Kyle Shanahan was willing to take.
Purdy finished with a passer rating of 111.3.
“I don’t want to get caught up in stats and stuff,” Purdy said. “There’s some throws out there that I missed.”
There weren’t that many. Certainly not enough for the Giants.
What about that punch from 49ers lineman Trent Williams?
Pro Football Writers’ Assocation reporter Matt Barrows followed up after the game with NFL Senior Vice President Walt Anderson to ask why Niners offensive lineman Trent Williams wasn’t ejected for the punch he threw at Giants defensive lineman A'Shawn Robinson right before halftime.
“When we have a flag thrown on the field for unnecessary roughness, members of the officiating department are able to review the available video to determine if there is a flagrant action that should result in a disqualification,” Anderson said. “We ended up looking at the video we had available to us, and we just didn’t see anything that rose to the level of flagrant, which is the standard we have to apply to disqualify the player.”
Asked if striking someone in the facemask doesn’t rise to that level, Anderson said, “These are judgment calls and a lot of times you might end up having an open hand, often a stiff arm to the face, versus a closed fist punch, which certainly carries a different weight to it.”
Anderson went on to say that on primetime games, “there is often a whole lot of camera angles. [And] from the ones that we looked at, we just felt that it didn’t rise to the level of flagrant.”
Kimberly Jones covers the Giants for Newsday, a beat she first worked in the early 2000s before joining the YES Network to cover the Yankees. She worked for the NFL Network for more than a decade and has been heard semi-regularly on WFAN.
