I don’t need to tell you that the 49ers made a mistake by drafting Trey Lance No. 3 overall in 2021.
The team admitted as much last summer, when they traded the bust of a quarterback to the Cowboys for a measly fourth-round pick.
It was a massive swing and a miss — the kind that would usually find a head coach and general manager on the hot seat, if not out on the streets.
Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch feel no such pressure. But that’s not to say the team isn’t dealing with the ramifications of trading up and picking Lance.
The Niners 53-man cut-day roster, delivered on Tuesday, shows the extent of the problem.
Yes, the Niners have superstar players all over the field, but this roster is a mile high and an inch deep.
And it’s made something else crystal clear: Picking Lance was a mistake, but the bigger problem for the Niners was trading those two first-round picks (2022, 2023) in the trade up.
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Those were two high-value picks that could have provided starter-caliber players, or, at the very least, worthwhile depth for the roster. The NFL draft might be a crapshoot, but first-round picks stand the best chance of standing out early in their careers.
Without those picks, the Niners’ roster depth is such an issue at some positions that the team has little choice but to add a few reinforcements from the list of players cut by other teams on Tuesday.
Yes, the Niners are going to have to go dumpster diving.
Do the Niners have a Super Bowl-caliber roster? Absolutely. What else will you call a team that has three MVP-caliber offensive players and two guys who can win Defensive Player of the Year?
But will the Niners’ roster still look like a Super Bowl contender after two or three months in this war of attrition we call professional football?
The root cause of this roster depth deficiency is clear-cut:
The Niners simply have not drafted well enough in the last few seasons. And when you’re paying more than a handful of players top-of-the-market salaries, you need to fill out your roster with young (see: cheap) players.
The Niners haven’t done that, and it’s this 2024 team’s Achilles heel.
Now, the Niners’ draft class of 2024 looks promising in practices and preseason games. Ultimately, though, we have no idea if any of their new crop of draft picks is any good — they haven’t played real NFL games yet.
We can, however, speak on the past two seasons — the drafts where the Niners lacked a first-round pick, thanks to the Lance trade.
And those drafts have proven to be a hot mess.
Here’s a list of all the hits from the Niners’ 2022 draft class:
• Purdy
That’s it.
Spencer Burford, Kalia Davis, and Nick Zakelj are fringe roster players at this point, and everyone else has been cut or jettisoned.
The Niners had nine picks in that draft. The only starter — the only reliable player, really — from the class was the last pick.
That’s a disaster. I’d ask where this team would be if Purdy hadn’t hit, but even amid a pessimistic column, it’s too dark to contemplate.
Tuesday’s cuts told us that the Niners’ 2023 draft wasn’t much better. Second-round pick Ji’Ayir Brown has a chance to be a star, and third-round pick Jake Moody is the team’s kicker, but the Niners cut fellow third-round pick Cameron Latu Tuesday, and Robert Beal, Dee Winters, and Darrell Luter are end-of-the-roster guys.
That’s two reliable players in a class of nine players. And, again, one is a kicker.
It all adds up to an abysmal hit rate.
Yes, the 49ers could have botched their first-round picks in 2022 and 2023, had they kept them, but the fact remains that the Niners spent the last two critical seasons playing the lottery at the draft, and they’re no richer for it.
And while I would argue that San Francisco has solid depth in a few spots on this roster — running back, cornerback and wide receiver (particularly after using a first-round pick, Ricky Pearsall, on a wideout this season) — it should be noted that those are the positions that boast the deepest talent pools in the college game.
Are the Niners really good at identifying talent at those spots, or is picking players at those positions something close to foolproof?
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Meanwhile, depth on the lines — where games are won and lost in the NFL — remains woeful. The Niners lack enough pass rushers and defensive tackles — they’ll have to add a few off the street.
If Trent Williams follows through on his threat to retire unless the Niners give him a pay raise, the Niners will have the worst offensive tackles in the NFL this season. And there’s no tackle of the future — which could come as soon as Week 1 — on the roster. Meanwhile, Dominick Puni, a third-round pick this season, will start at right guard, but that says as much about the talent vying for that spot as it does about him.
All of this might not matter. It didn’t last year.
Or all of this could define the Niners’ season. It did in the post-Super Bowl 2020 season, when the Niners were hit with a downright comical amount of injuries.
Football is a sport played with an oblong ball. No one knows which way it’s going to bounce. And that’s a good metaphor for the sport, overall.
Last year the Niners had incredible injury luck, posting the fourth-fewest adjusted games lost last season, per FTNfantasy.com’s Aaron Schatz.
Maybe that’s a trend.
But this part is undebatable: given the lack of depth with this roster, it better be.
