How 49ers’ Purdy heard about Cowherd’s odd backward hat criticism originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
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Brock Purdy does his best to tune out the noise, but sometimes his detractors’ opinions make their way back to the 49ers quarterback.
One critique of the now-third-year quarterback, and perhaps the oddest Purdy critique to date, was Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd claiming in 2023 that he had concerns about Purdy’s professionalism as San Francisco’s franchise quarterback due to him wearing his hat backwards at a press conference earlier in the season.
“There is one thing that does make me pause on San Francisco,” Cowherd said in Dec. 2023 on “The Herd.” “Brock Purdy, ‘Hey, you guys want to hit some golf balls?’ You got a hat on backward. He’s not a franchise quarterback.
“If that guy came to move your couch, you’d be like, ‘Are you a professional?’ … His dad needs to call him and say, turn that thing around.”
Cowherd’s odd critique was one of the few that made its way back to the 49ers signal-caller, who revealed on Tuesday’s episode of “The Rich Eisen Show” which teammate initially told him about it.
“I hear some stuff here and there. Deebo [Samuel] will be telling me stuff in the locker room,” Purdy told Eisen. “Just stuff throughout the year. Last year, the backwards hat dilemma, I don’t know if you remember hearing about that. Deebo came up to me and he was like ‘Dude, they’re saying you can’t be a franchise quarterback if you’re wearing your hat backwards.’ And I’m like, ‘Dang, bro, they’re saying that?’
“So I’ve got my news sources in the locker room with some of the guys. We laugh about it, we know what’s real and what matters most.”
Purdy responded to the outlandish take on multiple occasions, first, by brushing it off with a sly smile at the podium a few days after Cowherd’s comments before eventually showing up to the podium weeks later with a frontwards-facing hat, slyly claiming he “did a little growing up” when asked about his fashion apparel that day.
The laser-focused quarterback might not see or hear much of the criticism directed at him, but sometimes even he gets a laugh about some of the things pundits are saying.
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