Good Move Or Bad Move?

Revisiting 49ers’ 2019 personnel decisions

- Craig Massei

After their dismal 4-12 finish last season, tying San Francisco with two other teams for the NFL’s second-worst record, nobody really could have believed that the 49ers were so close to actually being somebody again in the NFL consciousness. Nobody, that is, except the 49ers themselves. Particularly general manager John Lynch and coach Kyle Shanahan, the leadership team that remained confident the 49ers were only a few more beneficial personnel decisions away from a turnaround that would make them contenders again. And they were right. Boy, were they right. But they still needed to hit on a few more roster- and personnel-tweaking decisions to make it happen, and for the third consecutive year, that’s just what the Lynch/Shanahan tandem attempted to do with a series of moves that carried up to the NFL trade deadline in October. Here, The Niner Report revisits the significant moves of the offseason — including one team-jolting midseason transaction — and examines how they have worked out for the 49ers to help push the team into the NFL playoffs for the first time in six years.

Timely trading at the top

With the NFL’s trade deadline looming on the horizon, the 49ers — the surprise team of the NFL season to that point — entered the fourth week of October as the last remaining undefeated team in the NFC with a clear path ahead toward grabbing an early stronghold on the conference’s No. 1 playoff seed by midseason.

But after an ugly 9-0 victory in the rain and slop at Washington, it was becoming more and more obvious that San Francisco’s receiver corps was not keeping up with the standard of quality play being provided by almost every other unit on the team. The 49ers got only four receptions from their wideouts in that game — three of them coming from backup Kendrick Bourne.