Harry Palmer wrote:CrimsonCrew wrote:Pattersonca65 wrote:
Alot of Dallas fans have been upset that the team gave up a fourth round pick for him. That didn't seem to bad a trade, only a forth. The 49ers blew three firsts. A major blunder that could have ended up dooming Shanahan/Lynch if the team did not continue to be successful
Easily one of the truly bad draft picks ever made. The only saving grace is that Fields and Jones also busted, so they didn't miss out on a game-changer on top of flushing four quality picks down the toilet. And again, no disrespect meant to Lance. It's not his fault they completely botched scouting him. But if I could see that he was a longshot in the NFL (I posted on this forum that I didn't see a first-round pick), how did they miss it? And I didn't even have the chance to run film with him, which should have tipped them off to his shortcomings in recognition.
As horrible a move as it seems to have been, I still prefer my teams willing to take big swings rather than play it safe. I think there are issues with their approach, mainly I think Kyle has blind spots, almost intentionally, but I still think the reasoning was sound, just that the execution (particularly trading up that early and then figuring out who to take) was poor and to be fair it did seem like everything that could go wrong did.
I agreed with the decision to be aggressive in pursuing an elite QB rather than overpaying a mediocre starter (anyone who isn't a top-10 or maybe 12 QB is grossly overpaid, IMO). That said, there were so many flaws in the implementation of that generally sound approach. They traded up months before the draft, paying a premium to do so, when they hadn't even fully evaluated the players. They tried to sell that as they wanted to be able to scout these guys without tipping their hands. But that's just asinine. You just paid absolute max value for a pick when the downside of tipping your hand would be...paying max value for a pick. And they did so with a guy (Jones) in mind who almost certainly couldn't justify the talent they would have to give up to bring him in.
Once they had paid that premium for the pick and decided to do some serious scouting, they just did a **** job of it. And sure, Lance checked plenty of boxes off the field. And again, it's not like Jones and Fields set the world on fire themselves. But they were in much worse situations. Lance was awful on the most talented roster in the league led by a widely acknowledged offensive genius. Fields and Jones were muddling through with bad coaching staffs (not overall for Jones, but take away Brady and Bellichick's offensive bona fides are pretty weak) and bad supporting casts. I don't know that Fields ever would have worked in our system, but he was very obviously physically superior to Lance in every way. And Lance is still so bad at any sort of recognition and processing that you've just got to question how they evaluated that part of his game.
So yeah, totally defensible big-picture plan, but the implementation of it was frankly pretty appalling.
