A lot of people liked Trent Baalke for a period of time. He made a lot of trades, and that’s always exciting. He stockpiled draft picks, and that’s always exciting, too. Of course, he wound up using those picks on players dealing with ACL injuries, and his methodology clearly quit working at a point.
Now with John Lynch, the 49ers have fewer draft picks than we are used to. They were awarded no compensatory picks on Friday, which isn’t unexpected. The 49ers lost a lot of free agents, players from the Baalke era, and thus had to sign plenty more to make up for those losses.
Still, though, the 49ers have more than enough picks to make it an interesting draft, and they give Lynch plenty of flexibility to move around, even after receiving zero of a possible four compensatory picks. The 49ers have a pick in each round, with two in the third and two in the seventh, for a total of nine picks.
They possess their own first-, third, sixth- and seventh-round picks in addition to the New Orleans Saints’ second-round pick, Chicago Bears’ third-round pick, Pittsburgh Steelers’ fourth-round pick, New York Jets’ fifth-round pick and the Kansas City Chiefs’ seventh-round pick.
That’s plenty of capital to move around. Who needs compensatory picks? Not Lynch.