Why the 49ers can’t ignore top draft prospects despite lacking a pick in Rounds 1 or 2

The San Francisco 49ers can just cross off the top-rated prospects in this year’s draft, right? The team lacks a first- or second-round draft pick and won’t be selecting a rookie player until late in the third round. So why bother doing too much homework on those prospects expected to go early?

Obviously, that would be a foolish way of looking at the draft. After all, you never know what might happen down the road. I’m not talking about a mega-trade that gets San Francisco back into the first or second round of this year’s draft. I’m talking about further down the road.

The 49ers seek to gather as much information as possible on as many of the prospects that seem like good fits within Kyle Shanahan’s offense or Steve Wilks’ defense.

“Say a guy gets picked in the first round and the next year his team wants to trade him,” 49ers assistant general manager Adam Peters told Matt Barrows of The Athletic this week. “Well, did we do all the work in college? Do we have all his character information? So you do the same amount of work on those top guys.”

That doesn’t mean the 49ers don’t scale back in some areas. The pre-draft process isn’t just film review. So much of it is getting to know the young kids heading into the NFL and evaluating their character.

Take running back Christian McCaffrey, for example. San Francisco had an opportunity to draft him in 2017 and did a lot of homework on the former Stanford running back. The team wanted to focus on building a formidable defensive line first, though, leading to the selection of Solomon Thomas. In hindsight, that is probably now viewed as a mistake.

When McCaffrey became available this past October, the 49ers had already done much of their homework. They now had the bonus of observing how the star running back performed at the NFL level. San Francisco didn’t hesitate to try to acquire the game-changing running back.

“You may not spend as much time with them on a 30 visit or at the combine,” Peters continued. “But you’re still doing the full workup on the guys because there are so many different scenarios where that player, that opportunity is going to come up whether it’s this year or four years down the road in free agency.”