No franchise has gotten more out of football's most unremarkable plays than the San Francisco 49ers. And the 2025 season, interestingly, complicated that story.
Pro Football Focus's Mark Chichester looked at an often-overlooked quarterback stat: "zero-graded throws." These passes aren't blown ***** ignments or highlight-reel plays, but rather throws where a quarterback is simply "doing his job," per Chichester, and making the play an NFL passer would be expected to make. The metric essentially tracks how a quarterback executes the offense he's in and how that offense produces by design.
Quarterbacks are, oddly enough, historically bad at this stat. Across nearly 221,500 zero-graded attempts from PFF since 2006, only one season has finished net-positive, with the average sitting at -0.060 expected points added (EPA) per attempt.
The 49ers have bucked that trend, though. They've been the league's most consistent outlier in routine throws for two decades, and especially during the Kyle Shanahan era starting in 2017.
Since 2006, three different 49ers quarterbacks rank among the top five in career EPA per attempt on zero-graded throws: Jimmy Garoppolo (No. 1, +0.111), Nick Mullens (No. 2, +0.076) and Brock Purdy (No. 5, +0.023). The trend holds on yards per attempt too, where Garoppolo, Purdy and Mullens sweep the top three spots outright at 6.43, 6.01 and 5.81 yards per attempt, respectively, which is ahead of every other qualifying quarterback in the sample.
Pro Football Focus's Mark Chichester looked at an often-overlooked quarterback stat: "zero-graded throws." These passes aren't blown ***** ignments or highlight-reel plays, but rather throws where a quarterback is simply "doing his job," per Chichester, and making the play an NFL passer would be expected to make. The metric essentially tracks how a quarterback executes the offense he's in and how that offense produces by design.
Quarterbacks are, oddly enough, historically bad at this stat. Across nearly 221,500 zero-graded attempts from PFF since 2006, only one season has finished net-positive, with the average sitting at -0.060 expected points added (EPA) per attempt.
The 49ers have bucked that trend, though. They've been the league's most consistent outlier in routine throws for two decades, and especially during the Kyle Shanahan era starting in 2017.
Since 2006, three different 49ers quarterbacks rank among the top five in career EPA per attempt on zero-graded throws: Jimmy Garoppolo (No. 1, +0.111), Nick Mullens (No. 2, +0.076) and Brock Purdy (No. 5, +0.023). The trend holds on yards per attempt too, where Garoppolo, Purdy and Mullens sweep the top three spots outright at 6.43, 6.01 and 5.81 yards per attempt, respectively, which is ahead of every other qualifying quarterback in the sample.
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