How has the front office done in San Francisco?
Jason and JD from Keep in the Faith spent over an hour going through every single draft pick the 49ers have made under Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch since 2017, and man, this is basically a masterclass in how a team can win so much while simultaneously whiffing on draft picks at a genuinely alarming rate.
The first round is kind of a mixed bag. Solomon Thomas in 2017 still stings—they had the third pick after trading up and could've had Patrick Mahomes or Deshaun Watson, but went with Lynch's Stanford classmate instead. Then there's Reuben Foster, who was supposed to carry on the linebacker tradition but became a cautionary tale about off-field concerns. Mike McGlinchey gets a lot of unfair criticism according to these guys—he was solid, they let Denver overpay him, and it worked out fine. Nick Bosa in 2019 was the obvious pick after Arizona took Kyler Murray, so that's the consensus best first rounder of the era. But then we get to 2021 and Trey Lance, which Jason and JD basically called one of the worst trades in NFL history. They invested three first-round picks to move up to number three, all based on a scouting process done over Zoom during COVID with no in-person visits. It's wild. The one saving grace is that Brock Purdy, picked last in the 2022 draft, ended up being the actual franchise quarterback and pretty much saved everyone's jobs.
The third and fourth rounds are where things get genuinely ugly. Like, these guys were visibly frustrated going through the names. The third round is loaded with whiffs—Jalen Hurd when they could've had Terry McLaurin (Kyle literally coached McLaurin at the Senior Bowl), Jake Moody as a kicker in the third round, Cam Latu, Danny Gray. Just brutal stuff. The fourth round might actually be worse. They're talking about guys who never even got uniforms, picks that did absolutely nothing. CJ West is the only one they feel good about, and even then it's incomplete. The one silver lining is that they just traded away their third rounder this year to avoid making another disaster pick.
Now the fifth round, that's where things completely flip. This is their best round by far. George Kittle is obviously the crown jewel—future Hall of Famer—but they've also hit with DJ Reed, Drake Greenlaw, Colton McKibben (who they let walk and he became an elite right tackle), and Jauan Jennings. Like, this round is legitimately stacked with hits. It's bizarre that they nail it so consistently here but completely botch earlier rounds.
The sixth and seventh rounds are basically forgettable. DJ Jones was a good pick before he left in free agency, but most of the other names blend together into a blur of mediocrity. Brock Purdy obviously becomes the exception that proves the rule in round seven.
The bigger conversation that kept coming up was just how confusing this entire organization is. They've been to two Super Bowls, won four NFC Championship games, and made the playoffs constantly, yet their draft record is objectively terrible. Like, other teams with this many misses wouldn't be winning anything. But the 49ers keep finding ways to win anyway, which Jason describes as "organized chaos." It's unexplainable.
They also went off about Jed York for a while, basically saying he needs to stop talking about football and stick to signing checks, because every time he opens his mouth about the sport itself he says something that makes them want to lose it. Then they pivoted to Brandon Ayuk, who apparently is in some kind of standoff with the team, and discussed how Stevie Johnson and T.J. Hightower (Ayuk's personal WR coach) both basically said something happened that caused this rift, even though nobody's talking about what it actually was.
Oh, and they touched on Dre Greenlaw's recent podcast where he revealed the 49ers kind of ghosted him during free agency and he had to call them himself to figure out what was going on. He clearly wanted to stay, and the team eventually flew out to his house to convince him, but it painted a picture of how cold things got during that negotiation.
Bottom line: this team is weird. They're really good at some things (winning in the playoffs, finding late-round gems), genuinely terrible at others (early-to-mid round picks), and somehow it all works anyway.