Here are the 49ers' options at QB. No, Mac Jones shouldn't be involved
Plus, how 17 games isn't a guaranteed win for the NFL AND why the Packers' commitment to Aaron Rodgers can't just be a contract extension
What are the 49ers going to do at quarterback?
In one way, the 49ers made their plans crystal clear when they finalized a deal with the Dolphins to move up to the No. 3 spot in the draft. You don’t give up all that draft capital (including two future first-round picks) if you don’t have your eye on a quarterback.
But which quarterback(s) do they fancy? And who will be starting under center in Week 1? I’m not so sure about that. Kyle Shanahan has said that Jimmy Garoppolo gives them their best chance of winning right now and that the 49ers aren’t actively trying to trade him. But that’s easy to say in March, before we know who their next franchise quarterback is.
With a month to go until the draft, I think there are three possible paths the 49ers could take:
1. The “covering your bases” route
The 49ers might not be trying to trade Garappolo, but Shanahan has confirmed they’re open to it if the offer is right. Of course, I’m not sure any team will be willing to part with, say, a first-round pick for an often-injured quarterback who’s due to make $25 million this season. But you never know, especially if a team loses its starting quarterback to injury before the season begins.
In this scenario, the 49ers would want a quarterback with plenty of upside who doesn’t have to start immediately — but could if Garoppolo is dealt (or gets injured again).
Candidates: Justin Fields, Zach Wilson
Wilson has been tied to the Jets for a while now, but nothing is certain except for Trevor Lawrence going No. 1. Thanks in part to his impressive pro day, there is *finally* backlash to the Justin Fields backlash, and draftniks like Mel Kiper are reminding everyone how Fields is the type of quarterback worth trading up to land.
I don’t know if Robert Saleh has divulged to his old boss who the Jets are planning to draft at No. 2, but the 49ers would be in good shape with either Fields or Wilson, whether they’d need to play in 2021 or not.
2. The Patrick Mahomes route
More often than not these days, if a team uses a first-round pick on a quarterback, then he’ll start his rookie year. Maybe not in Week 1, but probably before midseason. There has been one notable exception recently: Mahomes, who sat for a year behind Alex Smith before taking the NFL by storm (TBD on what becomes of Packers quarterback Jordan Love).
The 49ers had the chance to draft Mahomes in 2017 but passed on the future MVP, and Shanahan has since admitted that he didn’t evaluate Mahomes as much as he should have.
Let’s say Shanahan has pored over the tape and believes there’s a quarterback (or more than one) who has the chance to be special but might need time honing his technique. And let’s take Shanahan at his word that he believes the Niners can win this season with Jimmy G. It’s not crazy, either — if healthy, this roster is more or less the same as the one that was 15 minutes away from winning the Super Bowl two years ago.
So the 49ers are positioned well for this year and the future. They can move on from Garoppolo and his massive salary after the season and hand the reins to their new quarterback, who will still be on his rookie deal, thus allowing the Niners to keep paying their homegrown talent and recruit highly coveted free agents.
Candidates: Justin Fields, Trey Lance, Zach Wilson
Even though Fields and Wilson could each start right away, it’s not outrageous to think either could benefit from taking time to acclimate to the NFL. Meanwhile, Lance might have the highest ceiling of any quarterback in this year’s class. He’s also pretty raw and could gain the most from sitting and learning, a la Mahomes.
And all three have the potential to be fun as hell in Shanahan’s offense. Unlike ...
3. The “as exciting as white bread” route
Shanahan has tried to dismiss any talk of Kirk Cousins being his prototypical quarterback, but if he has been looking for a Cousins redux, there’s really only one candidate.
Candidate: Mac Jones
Jones has the most Kirk Cousins potential of any of the first-round prospects. (Personally, I think Kirk Cousins is Jones’ ceiling, but I could be wrong.)
While some — well-connected media folk like Peter King and Ian Rapoport, as well as Shanahan’s old roommate, Chris Simms — think the 49ers could end up taking Jones, others disagree:
Shanahan opted to attend Jones’ pro day on Tuesday instead of Fields’, though Shanahan is expected to be at Fields’ second pro day and has already seen Fields throw live. So the 49ers coach was on hand to witness Jones’ so-so day, including an overthrow that left Bill Belichick absolutely disgusted and Shanahan looking like he was reliving 28-3:
It’s also possible any buzz about the 49ers and Jones is a smokescreen. The 49ers could throw Jones out there right away, but it’s so boring. And at this point is he even an upgrade over Garoppolo? And would any team really give away two future first-round picks for Michael McCorkle Jones? Sure, the Bears might, but the 49ers? I think, and hope, they’re savvier than that. — SH
The Packers’ commitment to Aaron Rodgers can’t *just* be a contract extension
The lack of movement between Rodgers and Green Bay suggests the Pack need a grand gesture to keep things copacetic in Wisconsin.
With a few exceptions, the Packers typically avoided major free agent signings before general manager Brian Gutekunst took the reins in 2018. There were a few big names like Reggie White and Charles Woodson, but for the most part Green Bay played out its offseason like its fellow old world NFL franchise in Pittsburgh. The Packers were a place where stars were developed, not lured.
That changed once Gutekunst was put in charge of building the green and gold roster. His first season saw notable, but unreliable veterans like Jimmy Graham, Marcedes Lewis, and Muhammad Wilkerson head north. His second saw a spending explosion completely foreign to Wisconsin’s NFL franchise.
Gutekunst spent big to bring Za’Darius Smith, Preston Smith, Adrian Amos, and Billy Turner to Green Bay. Then, he just sorta stopped.
In 2020, Ricky Wagner, Devin Funchess, and Lewis served as the team’s top three free agent priorities. 2021 has been more of the same. While the Packers spent big to keep Pro Bowl tailback Aaron Jones around on a four-year, $48 million extension, their biggest non-Jones signing has been … Marcedes Lewis for two more years and $8 million. They also re-signed Kevin King, fresh off getting absolutely burned in the NFC title game, for $5 million with nearly $4m of that guaranteed.
This has gotten the Packers under 2020’s shrunken salary cap, which is good! It has also failed to give Aaron Rodgers the receiving help he needs months after Green Bay’s top-heavy passing attack was shut down by the smothering defense of the eventual Super Bowl champions. Gutekunst’s 2019 spending spree helped upgrade the team’s defense, but it also handcuffed his ability to make improvements in the years that have followed — and the Pack have been mired as a good, but not great team ever since.
There was an easy route to create spending room for Gutekunst. All it would have taken was a contract extension for reigning MVP Rodgers that would have carved down his massive $37 million cap hit in 2021 by pushing that money onto years down the road where a larger cap waits. That deal wouldn’t have been controversial or even that original — players like Tom Brady and Taysom Hill signed similar deals this spring that rewarded their recent performances while keeping an eye on roster building.
It hasn’t happened for Rodgers. Team executive Mark Murphy declined to elaborate on why the two sides couldn’t find a reworked contract that made both the franchise and quarterback happy. It’s possible that the mercurial superstar saw a team that traded up for a rookie gunslinger last spring and failed to add any impactful receiving help at all last season and came to an easy conclusion. Green Bay isn’t building around him like he wants. His future may lie elsewhere.
Keeping Rodgers means more than just money. It means giving him the tools he needs to thrive — much like the Buccaneers did with a 43-year-old Brady. This offseason presented an opportunity for the Pack to add some important veterans at low-cost one-year deals. Green Bay hasn’t signed a single one.
Why haven’t the Packers taken a swing at a depressed wideout market?
Kenny Golladay got a well-deserved raise to chase down pick-sixes with the Giants over the next four years. Corey Davis, Curtis Samuel, and any pass catcher the Patriots signed all inked lucrative contracts. Other than that, this year’s crop of talented veteran receivers has been left waiting for long-term offers that haven’t come. Many have settled for relatively inexpensive one-year deals that will allow them a chance to cash in for a predicted salary cap boom in 2022. None have signed with Green Bay.
After flirting with the idea of adding Will Fuller before last year’s trade deadline (a move they would have regretted following his six-game PED suspension late in the season), the Packers “kept an eye” on Fuller as his stock plummeted like post-shenanigans AMC shares and ultimately watched him become a Miami Dolphin for the relatively low price of $10.6 million for one year. This would have been a tight squeeze for a team that currently has just under $3 million in cap space and more than $205 million in contracts lined up for 2022, and it would have been at least partially redundant with inexpensive deep threat (and point-of-catch random event generator) Marquez Valdes-Scantling on the roster. Still, if Fuller was thought to be a difference maker last season, why not now when the cost was cheaper?
The same goes for other veterans who could have added some punch to the WR corps. JuJu Smith-Schuster may have rejected Green Bay’s overture in favor of an $8 million deal to return to Pittsburgh anyway, but there’s no indication the Packers were even in the running. T.Y. Hilton, A.J. Green, John Brown, and Emmanuel Sanders are all past their primes, but any could have been a depth option who would have excelled with Rodgers behind center. Marvin Jones averages four catches, 67 yards, and a touchdown per game in his career vs. the Pack. He’s now a Jacksonville Jaguar.
There are still wideouts to be found, but all are dicey. Golden Tate may have something left in the tank and might just be grateful enough to be rid of Daniel Jones to sign a bargain deal in Wisconsin. Dede Westbrook is useful as a third option. Marquise Goodwin is very, very fast, which is fun!
None of those names move the needle all that much. Outside of Tate, I think I’d rather have the hands and stellar blocking of Allen Lazard in the lineup than almost anyone still lingering in free agency right now. Which means…
The Packers are gonna have to draft some wideouts this year
Hey, we said that last year, too! And, because Gutekunst makes his decisions by laying all his options out on a Twister pad, throwing a Snack Pack over his shoulder, and picking the note card with the most pudding on it, Green Bay came out of the first four rounds of a wideout-heavy draft with:
A backup QB coming off a down year in the Mountain West
A bruising running back who served as the team’s RB3 in 2020 (he’ll be RB2 this fall!)
A tight end who had one catch as a rookie.
Rodgers was so pissed off by all this he went out and played his best football in YEARS, earning his third regular season MVP award in the process. The Packers’ quiet offseason suggests management may be poking the bear again in 2021, but that would be wildly stupid in *another* draft ridiculously flush with receiving talent.
Green Bay’s placement at the end of the first round disqualifies the club from adding DeVonta Smith, Jaylen Waddle, Ja’Marr Chase, or tight end Kyle Pitts. It doesn’t DQ them from welcoming any of a long list of upper-tier prospects on Days 1 or 2 of this year’s NFL Draft.
We know Minnesota wideout Rashod Bateman can thrive in the cold since he spent his college career roasting Big Ten defenses at TCF Bank Stadium.
Maybe Gutekunst looks at Purdue home run threat Rondale Moore and sees a versatile playmaker in the vein of Randall Cobb.
Perhaps Terrace Marshall’s combination of size (6’3, 200 lbs) and production regardless of quarterback at LSU is enough to give him Justin Jefferson bonafides at the next level.
There’s been a plethora of Pro Bowl talent at wideout taken either at the tail end of the first round or the next day in rounds two and three. Notable names include:
Michael Thomas (47th)
Tyler Boyd (55th)
JuJu Smith-Schuster (62nd)
Cooper Kupp (69th)
Chris Godwin (84th)
DJ Chark (64th)
A.J. Brown (51st)
D.K. Metcalf (64th)
Tee Higgins (33rd)
and Chase Claypool (49th)
Of 47 wide receiver picks between 25 and 100 from 2016 to 2020, 27 have had at least one season with 600+ receiving yards. This would be a boon for the Packers. In the last three years, Green Bay’s 600+ yard receivers were:
Davante Adams (three times)
Marques Valdez-Scantling (once in 2020, and that came with an 11 percent drop rate.)
Picking up a wideout before Day 3 would be a turnabout for the franchise. Green Bay has only drafted a WR among the double-digit picks once since drafting Adams in 2014 — and that was Ty Montgomery, who plays running back in the NFL.
Green Bay is a flawed contender. Its receiving corps isn’t the only thing Gutekunst needs to fix. The Packers have spent the past two seasons with a below-average rushing defense that contributed to back-to-back NFC title game defeats. Protecting Rodgers will be a priority after losing All-Pro center Corey Linsley to free agency. The team’s linebackers are, in a word, bad.
But no addition will garner more headlines than a wide receiver that can act as a complement to Adams rather than just a guy who gets the ball when he’s triple-teamed. Gutekunst hoped that would be Devin Funchess last year, and the former Michigan standout will get that chance again in 2021 after sitting out last season due to COVID-19 concerns. But Funchess is still a guy who had only 47 catches in his last 15 games and has only suited up once in the regular season since 2018. He alone won’t be the answer.
The pressure is now on Green Bay to find the kind of budding wideout who can not only lift the Packers’ passing game but convince Rodgers to retire in green and gold whenever he decides to call it a career. Getting their star QB another contract extension — namely one that reduces the team’s salary cap responsibilities this year and next — is a priority, but there’s no guarantee Rodgers will sign anything until he sees his front office make a commitment to him elsewhere.
Drafting an impact receiver in the first or second round would be a sign the franchise will continue to support its latest Hall of Fame quarterback. If nothing else, it would at least make up for Gutekunst’s lack of agency in this year’s free agent derby. — CD
The downside of 17
No, that is not yet another Matt Gaetz joke; it is, of course, a reference to the NFL’s decision to make the regular season a 17-game affair. (Though it is weird to see the NFL getting stiff-armed out of the spotlight by another protofascist politician… again.)
The extra game is a win for owners and players, and no doubt the new mega broadcast contracts hinged in no small part on having more content--you realize when you’re out of the NFL media business just how tedious NFL media business reporting really is. Both get more money to share. And while I’m not super excited about billionaires making more money, at least it will give the people who sacrifice their long-term health for our entertainment more scrilla scrilla too.
But for us fans, the extra week of the season is not much of a win.
Sure, there will be one less preseason shitshow to sit through, but that’s not really a 1:1 tradeoff. The starting lineups never see more than a full half of half-speed action in any one exhibition match, and rarely a single second of the fourth one.
I still tend to filter a lot of this through the lens of the 80-hour work weeks that Christian and Sarah and I had to put in back in the day. The idea of one more non-stop 48-hour workday bleeding from Sunday into Monday exhausts me to think about. But all that mind-melting screen time does give you some insight into a subject. In any week of the season, barely half the games are actually good to watch, maybe. By the quarter pole, you can even start to weed out the teams whose season highlight is going to be spoiling the playoff race for some other team on the fringe. By the halfway point, at least a quarter of the league is effectively eliminated from the playoffs. And by the last month of the season, there are only so many games that actually count for something.
An expanded playoff field mitigates some of the meaningless games which are only good for shortening the already brief windows players have in the league, but not all of them. Sure, some of those dogshit games around New Years can be kind of fun, when you get the rare emboldened coach who decides not to play conservative or even just the random hijinxs because the quality of the teams is so terrible. Still, adding even more meaningless football to the schedule is ultimately a bad thing for the NFL.
The league’s doomsayers have gotten louder and louder over the years. I’ve always tended to wave them off because they usually sound like they have an agenda. But there is an eerie warning about over saturation that’s not irrelevant here. People, even Americans, do eventually get enough of something (except for cheap meat). Another week of hopeless teams like the Falcons going through the dance just because they have to is ultimately going to put more people closer to their saturation point. --RVB