Brock Purdy, 49ers beat Lions to reach Super Bowl with huge second-half rally in NFC title game

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The San Francisco 49ers were on the brink, needing a spark to overcome a big deficit and avoid a third straight NFC Championship Game loss.

Brandon Aiyuk delivered with an improbable catch that helped put the 49ers in the Super Bowl.

Brock Purdy’s 51-yard pass that deflected off defender Kindle Vildor’s facemask into Aiyuk’s hands helped the 49ers rally from a 17-point halftime deficit and beat the Detroit Lions, 34-31, on Sunday.

The 49ers scored 17 points in an eight-minute span of the third quarter to tie it and pulled away in the fourth quarter to earn a rematch against Kansas City on Feb. 11. KC beat the 49ers in the Super Bowl four years ago.

“No one was rah-rah,” Purdy said. “No one was freaking out. It’s football. There’s a lot of experienced guys on this team, veteran guys who have been in crazy situations. We were just like, ‘We have to do our job.’ ”

San Francisco mounted the fourth-biggest comeback in a conference title game, thanks to some big plays by Purdy and some help from the Lions, including two failed fourth-down conversions in field-goal range.

“We’re not going out like this,” coach Kyle Shanahan said of the mindset at halftime. “Guys didn’t want today to be the last day. We put ourselves in a hole. They played like it in the second half and we were able to get the ball to bounce the right way and we made up for what we did in the first half.”

After facing questions about whether he could lead a comeback, Purdy has done it twice in as many weeks. He engineered a game-winning drive in the fourth quarter to beat Green Bay last week and had an even bigger comeback against the Lions.

He passed for 267 yards and a touchdown and ran for 48 yards, thanks to a pair of 21-yard scrambles. Now the last pick of the 2022 draft (aka “Mr. Irrelevant’’) will be starting in the Super Bowl.

“All he’s done since he’s been here is play at an elite level,” said Christian McCaffrey, who had two TD runs. “Everything starts with him. We’re lucky he’s our quarterback. He takes a lot of heat for absolutely no reason.”

Little-used backup Elijah Mitchell scored on a 3-yard run to give the 49ers a 34-24 lead with 3:02 to play.

Jared Goff threw a touchdown pass to Jameson Williams with 56 seconds left, but the 49ers recovered the onside kick.

Trailing 24-7 at halftime, San Francisco settled for a field goal on the opening drive of the second half before the game flipped in a four-minute span.

Lions coach Dan Campbell opted to go for it on fourth-and-2 from the 49ers’ 28, but Josh Reynolds couldn’t hold on to a pass from Goff, leading to a turnover on downs.

The Lions then seemed to have a potential interception when Purdy’s deep pass hit Vildor in the facemask, but the ball popped up and was caught for a spectacular 51-yard gain by Aiyuk.

“When I saw him catch that, I was like, ‘That’s insane,’ ” Purdy said.

Purdy found Aiyuk three plays later for a 6-yard score.

“Before the game, a ladybug landed on my shoe. And you all know what that means,” Aiyuk said. “That’s all I can say. Other than that, I don’t know.”

Jahmyr Gibbs fumbled on the next play from scrimmage, setting up a 1-yard run by McCaffrey to tie the score at 24.

It got worse from there for the Lions, with Reynolds dropping another pass on third down, leading to a punt that Detroit had a chance to down at the 1 but botched. Purdy then drove the 49ers to a 33-yard field goal by Jake Moody and their first lead.

“Momentum certainly changed pretty quickly,’’ Goff said. “They scored, we didn’t convert the fourth down, they scored again, we turned the ball over. That little sequence right there makes it tough.”

Detroit had a league-high 62 conversions on fourth down in Campbell’s three seasons, and he bypassed a chance at a tying field goal on fourth-and-3 from the 49ers’ 30 midway through the fourth quarter. Goff threw an incomplete pass and the 49ers drove for the insurance touchdown.

“He believes in us,’’ Goff said. “I don’t know what the numbers are, but we had a lot of big-time conversions this year that changed games.”

“It’s easy in hindsight and I get it,” Campbell said. “I get that. But I don’t regret those decisions. And that’s hard. It’s hard because we didn’t come through. It wasn’t able to work out . . . And I understand the scrutiny I’ll get. That’s part of the gig, man. It just didn’t work out.”

The 49ers are trying to earn a record-tying sixth Super Bowl title and first since the 1994 season. “There’s been unfinished business for a while, man. Our team was set out for this for a long time,” Shanahan said. “It’s been a long year to get to this point, and we got it done today. It was hard at the beginning, but the character we have in our team, the type of guys we have, we can’t wait to get to Vegas, man.”

The Lions last won the NFL title in 1957 and have never been to a Super Bowl. They won back-to-back playoff games after winning only once in the postseason in the previous 56 seasons, but even after rushing for 148 yards and three touchdowns in the first half, they couldn’t finish the job.

“When you lose that way, it’s hard,” Campbell said. “You feel like you get your heart ripped out. But I’m proud of that group and I’ll go anywhere with that group.”

“Pretty devastated,” Goff said. “There’s a state of shock a little bit. I’m just proud to be a part of this team. It’s hard to juggle those two emotions of being proud of what we’ve done this year and dealing with the heartache of the loss.”