© Vasha Hunt | 2021 Jan 27
The 49ers fooled just about everyone. At this point that much is clear. The question that remains is: Why?
San Francisco had an overwhelming majority of NFL news breakers and draft analysts believing they were going to select Alabama’s Mac Jones with the No. 3 overall pick in last month’s NFL draft. They ended up selecting Trey Lance, and admitted after the fact that they were perfectly pleased not to discount the Jones rumors during the draft process.
Longtime NFL reporter Peter King, who was one of the many to strongly project Jones to the Niners, gave two theories as to why the 49ers leaned into, and possibly created, the Mac Jones smokescreen, in his Monday morning column:
“Suppose the Niners want to convince the world they’re picking Jones,” King writes, “and suppose they’ve talked to several teams about Jimmy Garoppolo in trade, and suppose they’re trying to get a ransom for Garoppolo, and suppose they think that if there are teams that want Garoppolo, they’ll pony up bigger packages than they’d offered. There’s another reason, too, for the mystery: Let’s take Kyle Shanahan at his word that he and Lynch didn’t decide with certainty that Lance was the guy until about 10 days before the draft. So for a month and a half, Shanahan could have deep discussions with coaches/scouts about the merits of the three quarterbacks available at three, so he could hear everything good and bad about them. If everybody in the organization knows you’re taking Player X, they’re more likely to echo-chamber all the good stuff about Player X rather than being totally honest about all three.”
So what this basically boils down to is 1) the 49ers wanted to drive up the price of Jimmy Garoppolo and 2) Shanahan didn’t want there to be an inherent bias affecting the analysis of those in the 49ers’ building when it came to judging these quarterbacks.
That second point not only seems reasonable, it was basically confirmed by Lynch and Shanahan after the draft.
“It was just, honestly to go through this whole process where nobody — my friends, coaches, anybody — knew how John and I feel and have felt this whole time and we do that because we don’t want to sway people in this building,” Shanahan said. “You want everyone to just work their butts off and give you their honest info.”