Can biometrics help NFL teams spot the next Brock Purdy?

As the NFL draft winds down on Saturday and the rookie free agent signing period kicks off, teams are on the clock to find the next Brock Purdy. San Francisco closed last year’s show after taking the 23-year-old quarterback with the 262nd and final pick on the board, a distinction that comes with the unfortunate nickname Mr Irrelevant. But when franchise QBs Jimmy Garoppolo and Trey Lance were both knocked out late last season, it fell to the Iowa State product to keep the 49ers’ playoff fortunes alive. All he did was win his first seven starts and lead San Francisco to the NFC championship game while posting the best rookie passer rating since Kurt Warner’s Cinderella Super Bowl run.

Now that Purdy has the 49ers moving on from Garoppolo and cooling on the idea of moving ahead with Lance (the enigmatic 2021 third overall draft selection that came at a significant cost to the team’s long-term future), pro talent evaluators are rushing to point out how, actually, they had Purdy pegged all along as Mr Relevant. Never mind if Steve Gara is among the few people who can say he saw clear signs of Purdy’s future success. “Even though he was in plain sight, to the NFL community, he was a hidden gem,” Gara says.

An ex-Marine turned sports analytics boffin, Gera found his way to the San Diego Chargers front office as NFL teams were sweeping for data nerds in the early aughts, as the Oakland A’s were proving the value of advanced statistics. While there and at the Cleveland Browns, he helped build a system for tracking biometrics but thought it unfair that players didn’t have an easy way to carry that data on to other clubs or effectively analyze it themselves.

So in 2020 he co-founded BreakAway, a clearinghouse that makes