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John Lynch knows the 49ers cannot waste the 13th overall pick in the NFL Draft on Thursday night. Losing a franchise cornerstone in DeForest Buckner for one pick necessitates acquiring an elite talent (or two) in return.
Lynch called the Buckner trade “probably the toughest thing I’ve done since I’ve been a general manager here.” He explained the decision to move Buckner on a Monday conference call, in which it effectively came down to Buckner being too expensive to retain.
“It’s a difficult part of this business, one that I don’t think you can really prepare yourself for when you move on from a player who embodies everything that you want to be about,” Lynch said. “We spend a lot of time talking about, ‘What’s a 49er to us?’ And Deforest Buckner embodied that in every way both on and off the field… We wanted to do our best to keep this team together. It became apparent in the discussions with him, that that wasn’t going to be a possibility, along with keeping our team together as we wanted to do.
So the Colts entered the picture, obviously with a pick, not only a first-round pick but in the upper half and we weighed that, the opportunity to sign other guys. It was one of those business decisions that’s so tough… It’s not without a heavy heart that we move on from him because he’s such a big part of what we’ve been able to do. We wish him and his family nothing but the best. They’re expecting a baby here soon and we left on really good terms, but I think that we got the 13th pick, what are we going to do with it? We got to do good things because we certainly lost a great player.”
Lynch also pointed to D.J. Jones, Solomon Thomas and a trio of injury-riddled, sometimes enticing, but unproven trio of interior linemen in Kevin Givens, Jullian Taylor and Kentavius Street as options to fill Buckner’s role. Lynch said Thomas “played well last year in a role, and we think that role will expand.” The reason the 49ers didn’t make any signings is because they don’t have much cap space and a few moves never actualized.
“All those guys have had, in some form or fashion, injuries, but that’s kind of the group we’re working with,” Lynch said. “We looked at some things during free agency nothing really came to fruition. So that’s the group there and, you know, we’ll see where that goes. But that’s that’s who we’re working with at this point.”
You can bet on the 49ers drafting an interior defensive linemen in this year’s draft (a pretty poor interior defensive line class), it’s just a matter of when.