Philly columnist responds to backlash over his 49ers’ Brock Purdy take

When Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Mike Sielski wrote about Brock Purdy ahead of Sunday’s big 49ers-Eagles showdown, he didn’t imagine how much his words would strike a nerve. But that’s what happened when the newspaper excerpted a quote from Sielski’s column for a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, just before kickoff.

The response to the pulled quote — “Jalen Hurts is admired and beloved here, but Brock Purdy would be a god in Philadelphia. A god,” Sielski wrote — had people calling out the column for its seeming implicit racism.

The column went up Saturday morning and didn’t really make waves for more than 24 hours, until the newspaper put the story back out with the pulled quote. The Inquirer’s post from Sunday afternoon at 12:36 p.m. PT, featuring a photo of Purdy waving to the stands, was approaching 1,000 replies and had more than 2,000 reposts (many quote posts) as of 10:30 a.m. PT Monday.

SFGATE reached out to Sielski via email Monday morning, hoping to discuss his column and the feedback it received. One minute after the email was sent, Sielski called back. He said it was “frustrating” to be in the middle of the social media firestorm because of one big reason: Internal metrics data showed that the 728-word story’s average engaged time, or how long a person spent on the webpage, was 10 seconds, he said.

“That tells you all you need to know about whether people actually bothered to read the entire column or whether they bother to base their opinions on one line that was extracted from it,” Sielski told SFGATE. “So yeah, it’s very frustrating because I think the column is perfectly reasonable and relatively innocuous and I stand by it.”

Whether intentional or not, Sielski’s column touched the third rail of the decades-long battle that Black quarterbacks have had to fight in the NFL. As Marc Delucchi previously reported for SFGATE, there is “a statistically significant gap between the rate that Black quarterbacks reached the Pro Bowl relative to their peers despite controlling for draft position.”

In full, Sielski’s column barely addresses Hurts beyond the quote that was excerpted in the Inquirer’s social media post. It also doesn’t directly address the race of either quarterback, instead focusing heavily on Purdy’s trajectory going from Mr. Irrelevant to, as Sielski put it, being “the NFL’s best story.”

But critics argued that Sielski “said the quiet part out loud” about Philadelphians with his argument. SFGATE asked Sielski about whether he thought race plays a part in which players Philly sports fans have chosen to love. He said he feels it “absolutely” does.

“I saw the idiots who thought AJ Feeley was better than Donovan McNabb. I saw the people who thought TJ McConnell was the best point guard since Magic Johnson,” Sielski told SFGATE. “That’s obviously there, that’s kind of baked into my thinking on Philadelphia sports.”

“We have a statue of Rocky in the city and not a statue of Joe Frazier,” Sielski told SFGATE. “That’s baked into Philadelphia. Is race a component of that? Yes.”

To Sielski, the details of Purdy’s story — last pick in the draft, climbing the depth chart only because of injuries, thriving after getting the opportunity — would be beloved in Philadelphia if it happened for the Eagles. SFGATE pointed to the fan reception of Nick Foles, who took over under center in 2017 when Carson Wentz got hurt and led the Eagles to their only Super Bowl win, as comparable to Purdy. Sielski agreed.

“Nick Foles is a god here, and it’s in large part because he won the only Super Bowl that the Eagles ever won, and it is in large part because of the nature of his story,” Sielski told SFGATE. “Would Carson Wentz be a god if he had quarterbacked the Eagles to a Super Bowl? Of course.

“Jalen Hurts is pretty much already a god here. Like I said, he’s beloved and respected — good luck finding somebody who has a bad word to say about Jalen Hurts in the greater Philadelphia area. But Foles, in a way, is a different matter. Not just because he won the Super Bowl, but because of how he did it. He’s the underdog who won the Super Bowl, of course he’s a god here.”

Sielski added: “That underdog aspect is so much a part of the city’s sports identity that it just … I don’t know, it’s just kind of taken for granted.”

The Eagles have had several prominent and successful Black quarterbacks over time, from Randall Cunningham to Donovan McNabb to Michael Vick and now Hurts. Sielski remembers Cunningham and McNabb receiving outsized backlash from the local fans, and particularly that comments about whether they were “real” quarterbacks were frequent.

But, he argued, the environment is different in the city now.

“Society, to a large degree, has progressed,” Sielski told SFGATE. “Are we still perfect? No, of course not. But the environment for Jalen is not the same as it was for Donovan McNabb.”

Sielski said his job as a columnist is to “make people think and look at things in a new way and find fresh takes and angles.” With his take on Purdy, he said he was trying to get his readers to consider something they maybe hadn’t thought of before.

“It doesn’t mean I think Brock Purdy is a better quarterback than Jalen Hurts,” Sielski told SFGATE. “It doesn’t mean that I want the Eagles to trade Jalen Hurts and try to acquire Brock Purdy or a quarterback like him. It doesn’t mean any of those things. It just means, ‘Hey, think about this game and this opponent in a way that maybe you haven’t.’”

It turned out that Sielski looked pretty prescient by Sunday evening. Purdy threw for 314 yards and four touchdown in the Niners’ 42-19 win over the Eagles and has now become the favorite to win league MVP. Hurts was solid, too, even though he left the game temporarily to get tested for a concussion. 

As the 49ers and Eagles proceed down a path that seems likely to lead to a rematch in the NFC playoffs, the two quarterbacks will undoubtedly take center stage in the NFL. And perhaps a line from Sielski’s column will circulate all over again.