INDIANAPOLIS – I have no idea how successful John Lynch will be running the San Francisco 49ers. No one really does. But even if he ends up being not quite up to the Herculean task of righting this organization, it won’t be for lack of effort or outside-the-box thinking. And he’ll go about his business with more openness, candor and humility than some have come to expect in recent years.
It’s difficult to project how someone with so little experience as an NFL scout, much less an NFL general manager, will do in a normal situation, much less one as desperate and broken as the 49ers franchise since its divorce from Jim Harbaugh. Lynch is inheriting perhaps the worst roster in football, and one without a single quarterback following Colin Kaepernick’s long-ago established parting from the organization. They’ve got issues, pretty much all over the place.
But it was refreshing to at least hear Lynch, a Hall of Fame talent at safety, be honest and realistic in his assessment of the task he has taken on fresh from the FOX broadcast booth, and not trying to pretend he has all the answers and is uniquely qualified to find the best football players on the planet.
The 49ers needed a complete reboot, which meant not only tossing aside Chip Kelly after one season as coach, but also getting rid of polarizing front office figures like Trent Baalke and Tom Gamble. It required being willing to go a completely different direction. Only time will tell if Lynch, with zero front office experience, turns out to be too extreme a direction – and if nothing else the vision and message of the Lynch/Kyle Shanahan regime is going to be less rigid and robotic than the recent norm in San Francisco.
“This is an iconic organization that has fallen on hard times,” Lynch said Thursday at the scouting combine in Indianapolis. “And my attitude is, how great it’s going to be when we get it back to where it’s supposed to be.”
It won’t matter in the long term if this team isn’t winning games, but there is something endearing about Lynch’s somewhat “aw, shucks” approach. He’s constantly smiling and beaming, and his passion for football pours through. He isn’t trying to pretend his team is just a player or two from being competitive; he isn’t trying to BS anyone. He readily admits it took some unusual thinking to end up in the seat he holds, but he also puts forth a positive aura, something obvious as people around the league are whispering about the improved atmosphere at team headquarters in Santa Clara. You can see why smart people would be galvanized by Lynch’s energy and be drawn to work for him.
Lynch was honest when probed about any discernible true strength about his roster, pointing to the collective play of his offensive line as a bright spot. Beyond that he noted the potential of his defensive line -- and with health and a little player development, they may have some anchors at defensive tackle -- but he avoids trying to convince you of what the eye test revealed on countless Sundays the past three seasons.
“We’ve got a lot of great potential there [with DeForest Buckner one potential impact player on the defensive line],” Lynch said. “It’s our job to draw that out of them.”
Oh, there is no shortage of work to be done, which began with Lynch and Shanahan watching as much film on current players as possible. And a considerable amount of effort will be focused on the quarterback position. The ability to identify a franchise QB likely will the determining factor as to whether they actually finish their six-year contracts. Presently, well, I suppose there is nowhere to go but up after the spiral they were in with Blaine Gabbert and Kaepernick last season.
“The quarterback position is one you have to hit on,” Lynch said.
Lynch can point to his own experience playing the quarterback position at the amateur level and information he culled from the best quarterbacks in production meetings as means of gaining insight into the position. And with Shanahan he has one of the true QB wizards in the game, someone who has coaxed quality production from Robert Griffin III, Brian Hoyer, Kirk Cousins and Matt Schaub, to say nothing of his work with Matt Ryan this past season.
“He’s masterful at getting the most out of his quarterbacks,” Lynch said of his rookie coach.
It is that varied roster of QBs who have excelled under Shanahan -- coupled with the dire straits of the roster -- that leads me to wonder just how motivated the 49ers will be to actually trade a bevvy of high picks for someone like Cousins, and then turn around and pay him $25 million a season for the next six years. Given the dearth of receivers and tight ends and corners and pass rushers on this roster, the prospect of dealing, say multiple first-round picks or a first-, second- and third-round pick for a veteran quarterback might not make sense, especially with Shanahan qualified to get the best out of cheap, young passers.
“There are a number of different scenarios we’re looking at,” Lynch said of his varied quarterback pursuits, “some of this includes, let’s add a young guy and let’s get an older guy to be there with him … We’ve got some great options at our disposal. A lot of people look at it like, ‘Oh my gosh, they don’t have any quarterbacks.’ But that’s also liberating … I think we’ve got a lot of great options at our disposal and we’ve got the No. 2 pick.”
I suspect the odds are much greater the 49ers end up bring in a Hoyer or Schaub type to be a placeholder and set a proper example of what it means to be a pro. A veteran deeply vested in Shanahan’s system who can be the embodiment of his mechanics, fundamentals, footwork in every practice and to help with the playbook in the quarterback meeting rooms. And he’ll pair him with a quarterback from the first round of this draft, perhaps even through a trade down. Lynch already has provided his thoughts on Notre Dame’s DeShone Kizer, Clemson’s Deshaun Watson, North Carolina’s Mitch Trubisky and Texas Tech’s Patrick Mahomes.
Lynch stressed that it’s still not out of the question that Kaepernick returns, and his skillset does mesh with some of Shanahan’s principles. Of course, that was never going to be at $16 million, and Kaepernick was always going to opt out even after having a productive initial meeting with Lynch once this latest regime took over.
“We left that door open in a very real and positive way,” Lynch said.
It doesn’t take much for Lynch to become animated when speaking about personnel or scheme or the particular difficulty of projecting skill players from these spread formations in college and figuring out how their abilities will translate to the pro game. He’s engaged and seemingly living his dream, going from a draftnik while still a player, spending that spring weekend glued to his television set watching even into the banality of the seventh round, to someone who will now be picking actual players through the duration of the weekend.
“I’m a football junkie,” he said.
We’ll see how far that enthusiasm, effort and charisma will carry him. Lynch doesn’t know much about failure -- in any capacity -- and his natural leadership skills are apparent. Then again, the scope of his chore cannot be underestimated, either, and this is no ordinary GM job he has assumed.
“It’s a fluid process,” Lynch said of analyzing the multitude of quarterback options via trade, free agency and the draft. “And we’re having a blast attacking it.”
