Jalen Hurts can improve in one important area. There’s a Super Bowl quarterback who can show him how.

LAS VEGAS — Deebo Samuel happened to be walking past the office of Brian Griese, the 49ers’ quarterbacks coach, one day last week. The wide receiver ducked in to talk with Griese about Brock Purdy. Griese told him that he wished Purdy was more demonstrative in the huddle, that he would do more to fire up the 10 other offensive players on the field.

Samuel nearly laughed in his face.

“I said, ‘Griese, we all feel it from him. He don’t really have to say too much,’ ” Samuel said Wednesday night. “It’s his demeanor, how he carries himself, not only in the huddle but how he walks around, how he talks to you. I don’t think I’ve seen Brock get mad.”

There are plenty of reasons that the 49ers are in the Super Bowl, and there are plenty of reasons that Purdy is the quarterback who helped them get there.

There is Kyle Shanahan, the team’s head coach, who is as innovative an offensive mind as there is in the NFL. There is Purdy himself, who threw for 31 touchdowns and led the league in half a dozen passing categories and has played better than anyone could have expected the last pick of the 2022 draft to play.

There is the reality that Purdy, as a seventh-round draft pick still on his rookie contract, earned a base salary this season of just $870,000 and accounted for 0.4% of the 49ers’ allocation under the salary cap, which allows general manager John Lynch to fill out the roster with a remarkable collection of talent.

But there’s another reason. And it’s relevant to the Eagles and their quarterback, Jalen Hurts. And it can’t be dismissed. The 49ers don’t merely respect Purdy. They love him. He connects with his teammates, all his teammates, in a manner that few quarterbacks do in their locker rooms.

“It’s all natural for him,” wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk said. “The way he plays, the way he leads, it’s all natural for him.” And though it’s convenient to dismiss this quality as the sort of ooey-gooey, feel-good compliment that people pay a quarterback when they can’t point to something more concrete or obvious as a source of his success — his arm strength, his accuracy, his mobility — the quality matters. It matters a lot.

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“It comes back to relationships,” said Griese, who started 83 games over his 11-year career in the league. “If you don’t have the ability to develop relationships at the core as a quarterback in the NFL, then it’s really difficult for you to develop trust. That’s what we’re really talking about: Leadership comes from guys in the locker room trusting you.

“That only stems from relationships. It doesn’t stem from anything else, like the way you walk or the way you talk or even sometimes the way you play. It’s about relationships. Guys have to genuinely want to go to war with you, and that’s what you see with Brock.”

Griese was told that his assertion seemed to contradict the perception or theory that leadership is merely a function of performance — that as long as a quarterback is playing well, his team will follow him.

“No, no,” he said. “Listen: The way you play on the field is certainly going to motivate and have an impact. You can’t substitute that. But there’s a laundry list of really talented and good quarterbacks who didn’t necessarily get the team to rally around him.”

It’s no secret by now that, for all the ways that he’s an ideal franchise quarterback, Hurts can be stoic, in public and private, to the point of being unapproachable. He could stand to close the distance between himself and his teammates, and that gap has only grown since he signed that five-year contract extension, which could pay him as much as $255 million, last year.

“He has to include other people,” a team source told The Inquirer last month. “He has to stop with the look of, ‘I have no emotion.’ It’s an emotional game. Everybody has emotions. That’s part of the deal. The more you give, the more you get back in return.”

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That Hurts isn’t naturally a Johnny Good Times, slapping backs and telling jokes and bonding with every backup on the Eagles’ roster, isn’t a gigantic flaw. But the line that separates an NFL quarterback from being better-than-average and being genuinely great can be thinner than floss, and the Eagles have too much invested in Hurts for him to fall too short of even so high a standard. This is a skill that he can improve, and he should try to improve it.

“I had to work at it,” Griese said. “I didn’t have the personality where it came natural to me. So I had to really work at it. Just because you don’t have that personality doesn’t mean you can’t be an unbelievable leader. Look at Steve Young. Steve Young kind of kept to himself and had a hard time developing relationships. There are a lot of different ways to get it done, but I do know if you don’t have that core foundation, it’s tough.”

Nobody’s demanding that Hurts be disingenuous here. Nobody’s demanding that he try to be someone he isn’t. Again, we’re talking small steps here, but those steps are important. There’s nothing wrong with asking Jalen Hurts to make everything a little easier for himself … and maybe a lot better for the franchise he’s charged with leading to a championship.