Something feels different about the 49ers. After two seasons of incompetence on the field and turmoil off it, new general manager John Lynch and head coach Kyle Shanahan have helped breathe life into a franchise that looked hopeless just eight months ago.
But the new regime isn’t just turning heads locally with their retooling of the roster and polished public personas. ESPN’s Adam Schefter joined Murph & Mac on Thursday morning, and was effusive in praising the new direction the 49ers organization is moving. Schefter believes that the Lynch and Shanahan duo have the potential to bring excellence back to San Francisco, and that he expects the team to be much better than people think this year.
“You say it’s the perception of competence, and I would say it’s not perception it’s reality,” Schefter began. “John Lynch when they hired him, and I said this at the time, has excelled in everything that he’s ever done. He went on to become a star at Stanford, he was a third-round pick, star in Tampa Bay, one day he’ll go into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And as well as he played on the football field, one of the things that made him so great is the way he handled himself and other people. He always knew just what to do and what to say. He’s just one of those people that gets it, right? He’s one of those people that if you had a daughter, that’s who you’d want your daughter to marry. That’s him. If you succeed in everything you’ve ever done and touched, I don’t care if you’ve never been in a front office — you’ve been around the sport, you understand it — and you can go do that and he has done that.
“Kyle, while he has not been in that type of role, in my mind is as smart from an X’s and O’s standpoint on the offensive side of the football as anyone in football, and has always been that. I know people take shots about the Super Bowl, come on man. There are a lot of different things that contributed to that, and it’s easy to go put it at his feet. Give him some of the blame, absolutely, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s one of the top offensive minds in the sport. So when you get somebody that knows X’s and O’s with somebody that knows how to manage people in a building and you put them together that is more than competence. That’s excellence.
How does Schefter think the 49ers will fare in 2017?
“Having watched a little bit of them this preseason it just seemed like — and I don’t want to read too much into the preseason, we’ll see how it goes in the 16 game regular season — but it just seemed like, it looked like a competent, competitive team,” Schefter said. “It looked better than people thought and I think it will be better than people thought. I don’t think they’re going to win the Super Bowl this year — it’s not realistic — but I would be shocked if they don’t make marked improvement and become competitive and look like a real football team out there that’s headed in the right direction.”
Listen to the full interview below. To hear Schefter’s comments on the 49ers, skip to the 5:30 mark.