In the million-points-of-data football world we live in, sometimes the best assessment comes down to just trusting the feel of people who usually know better. That’s the data point — having confidence in another person’s confidence. And when it comes to Brock Purdy, we should have listened to head coach Kyle Shanahan earlier and believed more of what he was saying.

When I watched Purdy dice up the Dallas Cowboys in a 42-10 win on Sunday, I couldn’t stop thinking about an interaction I’d had in Lincoln Financial Field in January, a few hours before the NFC championship game kicked off between the San Francisco 49ers and Philadelphia Eagles. Milling around the stadium tunnel, I ran into a longtime member of Shanahan’s inner circle and we tucked into the doorway of a utility room.

I was curious about quarterback Trey Lance, whose future as a 49er seemed less certain with each passing week. Only a few games had passed with Purdy as a starter, but he was already doing everything Shanahan wanted from Lance: winning, leading, growing — but most importantly, executing the job precisely as Shanahan was designing it. Even in the face of that, it was still hard to wrap my head around the last pick in the 2022 NFL Draft pulling the rug from under Lance, who had an immense amount of draft capital invested in him. Was this really happening?