49ers Talk: Evaluating San Francisco's 2026 draft class, expectations for picks
On "49ers Talk," co-hosts Jennifer Lee Chan and Matt Maiocco break down and provide analysis on San Francisco's 2026 draft class.
49ers Talk: Evaluating San Francisco's 2026 draft class, expectations for picks originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
Video Transcript
They sounded very confident in their post-game presser, John Lynch, Kyle Shanahan.
They got the players they wanted, whether it is the players that anyone outside the building thought that they were going to get.
Yeah, I think, you know, public perception probably won't favor the 49ers as far as, you know, the grades, the knee-jerk grades that everybody gives, the, you know, each team's draft.
Mm-hmm.
I would imagine that those grades will be low, but as we saw, you know, after the draft was over, the 49ers three kind of behind-the-scenes top personnel people came in- Mm-hmm and spoke to the media.
That was after John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan kind of recapped the eight picks, but, and they kind of gave us the reasoning for all the picks, and basically, the bottom line is, you know, they're not going through all the mock drafts or all the, you know, pundits, for the media organizations.
They have a whole bunch of people, including coaches, involved in the process to come up with their own board.
They're not relying on anybody else's board.
Right.
What really matters is how these guys play when it gets to week one, how they perform when it gets to year two.
Do they develop into players that are worthwhile?
You just can't make a judgment now and say, "Oh, this is a bust," or, "This person's not fit for the organization."
The people that you just mentioned, they know the team better than anyone else outside the building, and it appears that they are very happy with the guys they got to fit in where they're supposed to belong.
So the 49ers take, and when I say a controversial pick, once you talk to the guy, y- you know, it becomes less controversial because you can see some of those elements that we talked about- Mm-hmm of what attracted them to him, other than the fact that he's a really good football player, too.
Mm-hmm.
But Kaylon Black wasn't seen as, you know, a first or second or maybe even a third-round pick on what was widely considered a weak running back class.
But the 49ers certainly liked him, and in the third round, with the 90th pick, they made him the third running back off the board in this draft behind the two guys from Notre Dame.
Obviously, they love him, but when I asked Kyle Shanahan about Kaylon Black, there was that comment that he said, you know, and he knocked on the table.
He said, "You know, 2024, we went through every single running back we had.
We needed more, and so we needed to draft another running back."
2025, knocked on the table, he said, "Uniquely, Christian McCaffrey was healthy the entire season."
And that doesn't always happen.
In fact, it, multiple years for Kyle Shanahan as head coach, they've gone through multiple running backs.
So I think there's always that fear in the back of his head that they're not going to have a guy that they really want to carry the ball available because of injury.
Kaylon Black is a player who started out at James Madison, and the thing there is he did show some receiving skills over a two-year period at JMU.
The last two years at Indiana, where he won a national championship this last season, only eight catches total.
So I think people see that- Mm-hmm and it's realistic, it's logical to look at the receiving numbers- Right and go, "Oh, he's not a receiving threat."
49ers believe he is, and last year he had his 1,000-yard season with 10 touchdowns.
So it seems to me that the 49ers would not have taken him in the third round at number 90 overall if they didn't think that he could potentially be that guy, even as a rookie, who steps onto the field and starts to give Christian McCaffrey some breaks.
