{"id":876303,"date":"2026-04-27T19:36:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T19:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/876303\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T19:36:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T19:36:26","slug":"49ers-havent-changed-nfl-draft-strategy-so-why-would-results-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/876303\/","title":{"rendered":"49ers haven’t changed NFL Draft strategy. So why would results change?"},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco 49ers general manager John Lynch and head coach Kyle Shanahan are officially trapped in a Groundhog Day of their own design<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The 2026 NFL Draft is in the books<\/a>, and the verdict from Santa Clara is painfully clear: They haven\u2019t learned a single, solitary thing from the draft failures of their past. In short, they still think they\u2019re really, really good at this.<\/p>\n

Their track record violently disagrees.<\/p>\n

The 49ers\u2019 brass continues to step on the exact same draft-weekend rakes that have birthed a conga line of spectacular busts<\/a>. They reach absurd hypotheticals, ignore the outside world, and justify the whole mess with an arrogant smirk.<\/p>\n

They still think they\u2019re the smartest guys in the room. Of course they are, when external perspectives are rejected at the door.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a masterclass in hubris.<\/p>\n

Lynch didn\u2019t even blink when asked why his team\u2019s draft board looked like it was pulled from a random number generator, routinely leading to the selection of players who would have been available hours \u2014 or days \u2014 later.<\/p>\n

\u201cDepends on whose consensus,\u201d Lynch said. \u201cWe got consensus in this building. That\u2019s the consensus I care about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fair enough. You have to draft with conviction. But when your convictions yield Nick Martin, Isaac Guerendo, Jacob Cowing and the entire smoking crater that was the 2023 draft, maybe it\u2019s time to peek outside the bunker.<\/p>\n

Because this brazen self-assurance still leads to drafting guys 100 picks early just because an assistant coach got a warm, fuzzy feeling.<\/p>\n

To the Niners\u2019 credit, they nailed the start of this recent draft. They rightly pounced on Hawaiian receiver De\u2019Zhaun Stribling at No. 33 after two trade-downs, boxing out the Rams and a desperately thirsty Pittsburgh Steelers front office to snag him. They played the board beautifully, trading down, sitting patiently and landing defensive end Romello Height at 70.<\/p>\n

Those trade-downs gave the Niners a pocket full of picks to play with in the later rounds.<\/p>\n

And play with them they did. They let the coaching staff treat the war room like a Vegas buffet.<\/p>\n

Enter linebacker Jaden Dugger. He\u2019s a former Georgetown safety turned Louisiana-Lafayette edge rusher turned stack linebacker with an 84.5-inch wingspan. Lynch openly admitted that linebackers coach K.J. Wright banged the table for the kid because Dugger reminded Wright of\u2026 K.J. Wright.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018You\u2019re trying to draft yourself,’\u201d Lynch joked.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a nice anecdote, right up until you remember this is a multi-billion-dollar franchise making critical personnel decisions based on a positional coach\u2019s nostalgia trip.<\/p>\n

Also, I seem to remember K.J. Wright being much, much better at this.<\/p>\n

If you watch a four-minute YouTube highlight reel, sure, Dugger looks like a world-beater. But put on the unedited Louisiana-Lafayette tape or his Senior Bowl practices reps, and the concerns start piling up fast. He shows little play recognition ability. He misses tackles at an astounding rate. He gets engulfed in traffic. He\u2019s a great athlete, but that sometimes makes bad football look good against Sun Belt conference competition. Against NFL players? Yikes.<\/p>\n

Who cross-checked Wright\u2019s evaluation here?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s my conviction: If Wright can actually mold this kid into a clone of himself, hand him a head-coaching job tomorrow. But until then, it\u2019s a vanity pick.<\/p>\n

The only consolation is that we know who to blame for it.<\/p>\n

But this is the Niners\u2019 draft formula that holds nearly every year:<\/p>\n

Pick 1: The \u201cConsensus\u201d pick. Lynch wants everyone holding hands and smiling. (And it usually goes pretty well.)<\/p>\n

Pick 2: Typically Lynch\u2019s call. Generally tethered to reality, almost always a repeat of the same process that goes into Pick No. 1.<\/p>\n

Pick 3: Shanahan\u2019s guy. Usually, a biannual sacrifice at the altar of the running back position. This year, it was Kaelon Black, drafted roughly 100 picks too early (at the very least, 50). He joins Tyrion Davis-Price, Trey Sermon, Guerendo and Joe Williams in Kyle\u2019s pantheon of mid-round backfield whiffs.<\/p>\n

The rest of the draft:\u00a0The Assistant Coach Soir\u00e9e.<\/p>\n

D-line coach Kris Kocurek got his guy (there has never been a more Kocurek guy) in Gracen Halton: a nice selection.<\/p>\n

O-line coach Chris Foerster stamped Carver Willis and Enrique Cruz \u2014guys who fit the mold of the exact same offensive line that got shoved into lockers by the Seattle Seahawks three times last year. They might be good linemen. Foerster deserves the benefit of the doubt, but it\u2019s just more of the same, which wasn\u2019t good enough last year. It\u2019s not like everyone is going to be trying to rip off Seattle\u2019s Super Bowl-winning defense, right?<\/p>\n

Last year, they let special teams coordinator Brant Boyer pick Junior Bergen as a kick returner. Bergen didn\u2019t even survive training camp.<\/p>\n

After Robert Saleh hand-picked last year\u2019s defensive draft \u2014 resulting in Martin going at No. 75 in a panicked selection \u2014 you\u2019d think there would be some course correction against these vanity projects. Instead, they leaned in.<\/p>\n

The 49ers desperately love treating the draft as the ultimate flex of their untouchable internal process. They believe their evaluations are gospel.<\/p>\n

And yet every training camp, they\u2019re scrambling to make free agent signings and last-minute trades to fill out a roster with glaring holes after they realized a few of the guys they had such conviction about in April can\u2019t, in fact, play in August.<\/p>\n

Cam Latu, anyone?<\/p>\n

But you know what? Maybe they\u2019re right this time around.<\/p>\n

They better be.<\/p>\n

Because the draft is the foundation of any team.<\/p>\n

Who, since Brock Purdy was taken on a whim with the last pick in the 2022 draft, could be truly considered a foundational player for this team?<\/p>\n

Dom Puni, a guard? Nice player, but you\u2019re going to have to do a bit better than that.<\/p>\n

But when the process doesn\u2019t change and coaches still have outsized say on draft day, how could anyone expect the results to change?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Francisco 49ers general manager John Lynch and head coach Kyle Shanahan are officially trapped in a Groundhog…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":876304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2080],"tags":[220,7,1921,3171,929,6,1161,252,2624,2623,9,2833],"class_list":["post-876303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco-49ers","tag-49ers","tag-football","tag-inside-sports","tag-inside-the-san-francisco-49ers","tag-latest-headlines","tag-nfl","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-49ers","tag-sanfrancisco","tag-sanfrancisco49ers","tag-sports","tag-sports-columnists"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116478357257415300","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=876303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/876304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}