The San Francisco 49ers selected quarterback C.J. Beathard in the 2017 NFL draft after moving into the back end of the third round. Most people were stunned by the move, but in the days since, we’ve learned that Kyle Shanahan is big on Beathard. After the selection, he talked about accuracy and toughness. In Peter King’s MMQB column, we learned that Beathard was the only QB he wanted, and he saw some Kirk Cousins in him.
Shanahan made it clear that Beathard would be the team’s third string quarterback this season behind Brian Hoyer and Matt Barkley. They are looking to develop Beathard in hopes that he can emerge as a starter one day. You’d like all your draft picks to become starters, but in those first three rounds, you are making some statements with your picks.
With that in mind, we’re back with another look at what anonymous scouts have to say about the 49ers draft picks. Bob McGinn of the Milwaukee Journel Sentinel runs a pre-draft column every year featuring all sorts of random comments from anonymous scouts. They love giving opinions without attaching their name, and McGinn does a great job compiling the quotations.
I thought that for each 49ers pick that showed up in McGinn's column, I'd pull out what the scouts had to say. Some of the comments are going to be truthful, while it's possible others are scouts looking to get a guy down to them, or push him up to get someone else down to them. Whatever the case, it gives us opinions from people who do this for a living, with slightly greater repercussions than your average draft prognosticator. On Sunday, we looked at what they had to say about Solomon Thomas, and on Tuesday we looked at comments about Reuben Foster. Today, we move on to Beathard.
McGinn ranked out all the quarterbacks, and ranked C.J. Beathard No. 7, ahead of quarterbacks like Joshua Dobbs and Brad Kaaya. Here are what four scouts told McGinn about Foster.
1. “It wasn’t even close,” one scout said [about significantly better junior year than senior year]. “He’ll end up being one of the best backup quarterbacks in the league. As a starter, he doesn’t do a lot of things by himself. But he’s got a good arm, he’s accurate and has intangibles. Athletically, you want a little bit better.”
2. “He’ll play 10 years as a second- or third-team quarterback,” said a second scout. “He’s smart as (expletive) and a great kid. His grandfather should be in the Hall of Fame.”
3. “In the games where they put pressure on him he just starts putting the ball up for grabs,” said a third scout. “He did play hurt. In the bowl game they beat the crap out of him and he kept coming back.”