An “eff them picks” approach has many consequences. Among other things, it may make the efforts of a team’s college scouts less relevant.
On Friday, 49ers GM John Lynch suggested that trading early rosters makes the scouts’ work even more important to the cause.
“After today’s training, we’re going on Zoom with all our college scouts and this morning we’re trying to anticipate, they’re excited, they’re disappointed because all their boys are going here,” Lynch told reporters. “My message will be: This is all the more reason why we should make these choices count. We are fortunate that a number of different avenues, minority coaches that have given us a number of choices. I think that allows you to do something like that because you have a few [compensatory] threes, and you’ll get more with things of that nature in the future. But in the end you weigh everything and because of our belief in our team and what we think we can do and what [Christian McCaffrey] for us as a football team, you try to make a move like that, and it broke our way.”
The 49ers received a pair of compensatory draft picks in the third round in 2023, as a result of the 2020 hiring of Robert Saleh to coach the Jets and Martin Mayhew as the Commanders’ GM and the Dolphins’ hiring of Mike McDaniel in 2022. (Hiring Saleh and Mayhew on the same cycle resulted in a third-round pick in 2021, 2022, and 2023.) They also have a fifth-round pick, two seventh-round picks, and probably another pick or two if a result of net losses by free agents earlier this year.
But the first round pick is gone, thanks to the Trey Lance trade. And the second-round pick (along with a third-round and fourth-round pick) has been sent to Carolina for McCaffrey.
It’s a far cry from Mike Ditka’s 1999 Ricky Williams draft, when the Saints sent their entire list of picks to trade for the declining Texans. The 49ers still have work to do over design weekend. And the reduced stock of picks makes it more important that every lot they scratch becomes a winner.
With no choice in the first or second round in 2023, John Lynch had to give his scouts a pep talk that originally appeared on Pro Football Talk