The Need For 3

With trade deadline looming, is third QB asset or luxury?

- Craig Massei

Carrying three quarterbacks on the 53-man roster is a luxury in today’s NFL.

With roster needs and demands elsewhere in an era of more-specialized roles, most teams can’t afford to do it. Most teams don’t need to do it. A quarterback listed No. 3 on the depth chart would rarely play in a game under any circumstance.

Except the circumstance that every NFL team dreads: The starter goes down, and the backup gets hurt when called upon to replace him.

While NFL teams of yesteryear regularly kept three quarterbacks on the roster throughout the season, that trend has changed during the 21st century — and particularly as the year 2020 approaches. The majority of NFL teams didn’t carry a third quarterback on their roster entering the 2019 season.

But the 49ers did. And it had little to do with the injury factor.

“We have three very good quarterbacks,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan said. “I know we have three NFL quarterbacks who can help us.”

So, bucking the norm, and perhaps unconventional wisdom on a roster that could have used an extra player at several other positions entering this season, the 49ers kept both Nick Mullens and C.J. Beathard on their roster as backups to regular starter Jimmy Garoppolo.

Mullens, 24, and Beathard, 25, are young, developing quarterbacks that both entered the NFL with the 49ers in 2017 — Beathard as the team’s third-round draft pick and Mullens as an undrafted agent. They have combined for 18 starts since then because of San Francisco’s chaos at the position the past two seasons, giving both an unusual amount of experience for young backups playing behind an established “franchise” quarterback such as Garoppolo.