The 49ers might have nailed the 2024 NFL Draft

The concept of a team’s “closing window” is more flexible and malleable than people might think.

The San Francisco 49ers are seen as one of those teams with a closing championship window right now. Kyle Shanahan’s team has lost two Super Bowls to the Kansas City Chiefs over the last five full seasons, and made it to the NFC Championship game in both 2021 and 2022. The 49ers stand at 4-4 with their bye upcoming, but that’s not why they’re seen as a team supposedly on the decline.

The fear is that the team as structured is too reliant on expensive veterans who are getting older and may soon be on the decline, and when the inevitable Brock Purdy second contract happens, that will further push the overall team to top-heaviness in a financial and flexibility sense.

The only possible offset to such concerns is to draft like champs, and in that regard, the 2024 49ers have done so as well as is possible. Just halfway through the season, San Francisco already has five credible rookie starters — receiver Ricky Pearsall, cornerback Renardo Green, right guard Dominick Puni, safety Malik Mustapha, and running back Isaac Guerendo. That’s an incredible haul for one draft, and everyone in the building, starting with Shanahan and general manager John Lynch, should be pretty stoked about that.

“I’ve really liked our rookie class,” Shanahan said on October 23. “They’ve been strong since the beginning, the way they came to OTAs. I was real impressed with them through training camp. I am now. None of them really, with the thought of drafting, didn’t have starting roles. But we were excited with how they practiced and everything and knew they’d give us some depth and now some are getting some opportunities because of injury and I’m glad we have a good group there. I think they’ll be ready for the challenge and they seem like a tight group.”

What have these players done to amplify their NFL potential as an impressive collective? Let’s take a look.

Round 1, Pick 31: WR Ricky Pearsall

Pearsall, the Florida alum, was the latest starter of the group, though through no fault of his own – he was shot through the chest in an alleged robbery attempt on August 31, and he returned to the field against the Kansas City Chiefs on October 20.

Based on my pre-draft analysis of Pearsall’s Florida tape, he looked to me like an ideal “Z” receiver and slot weapon – not really a designated “X-Iso” receiver who’s going to win contested-catch battles at the catch point, but a guy who knows how to get open in space with his speed and route acumen. He reminded me in ways of Brandon Aiyuk in that regard, and with Aiyuk out for the rest of the season, that’s important now. He also had a 39-yard run against the Cowboys, which is nifty.

In two games, Pearsall has seven catches on nine targets for 59 yards, and most of those catches are of the variety you’d expect – plays where he shows a preternatural ability to get open.

Expect more from Pearsall as the season progresses, especially if the 49ers don’t make a trade before the deadline to augment their Aiyuk-less roster.

Round 2, Pick 64: CB Renardo Green

Green, from Florida State, was another personal favorite in the pre-draft process. I love aggressive press cornerbacks who will get up on receivers shamelessly and actually make it work. The Seminoles played a ton of press last season with Green as the firestarter, and as the 49ers have been one of the NFL’s top teams in terms of press coverage rate over the last few seasons, that seemed like a perfect schematic fit.

In the first half of his rookie season, Green has allowed eight catches on 17 targets for 110 yards, 14 yards after the catch, two touchdowns, one interception, and an opponent passer rating of 83.0. The two touchdowns allowed – against Tyler Lockett of the Seattle Seahawks in Week 6, and against CeeDee Lamb of the Dallas Cowboys in Week 8 – were not really coverage busts. The Lockett touchdown was a contested catch that could have gone either way, and the Lamb touchdown happened because safety Ji’Ayir Brown bumped into Green as Green was getting ready to cover Lamb’s vertical route.

Green has been exactly what the 49ers wanted with the pick – a smart, aggressive, fearless cornerback who can work past his mistakes (which are not frequent), and will show improvement over time.

Round 3, Pick 86: OG Dominick Puni

My pre-draft tape work on Puni was somewhat limited in comparison to a lot of offensive line prospects, but that didn’t matter in the end because after the 49ers selected him, they moved Puni to a place he didn’t inhabit. Puni racked up 849 snaps at left guard, 728 snaps at left tackle, one snap at center, and 12 as an inline tight end.

But the 49ers saw Puni’s future at right guard, and they couldn’t have been more right about that. Puni has played his new position at a level you’d expect from a five-year veteran with a couple of Pro Bowls under his belt. He’s allowed no sacks, no quarterback hits, and 14 quarterback hurries in 305 pass-blocking reps, and he’s been an absolute menace as a run-blocker in an offense that has to deal with the absence of Christian McCaffrey all season long.

I was at the Week 6 Thursday Night Football game in which San Francisco beat the Seahawks 36-24, and I asked future Hall of Fame left tackle Trent WIlliams how amazing it is that Puni has played this well at a position he’d never played before. That Williams didn’t know Puni had never played there kinda told the whole story.

Round 4, Pick 124: Safety Malik Mustapha

Back in the day, John Lynch was a dangerous, head-hunting safety who played at a Hall of Fame level (inducted in 2021), so it makes sense that one of the stars of San Francisco’s draft class is a player with a similar profile. In his Wake Forest days, Malik Mustapha was more of a box/slot/overhang defender than a true free safety, and one of his primary jobs was to come down and lay the wood near the line of scrimmage.

The 49ers have put Mustapha in the deep third far more often, and he’s responded about as well as Dominick Puni has – to the point where you’d never know he hadn’t been there for years. Mustapha has allowed four catches on 11 targets for 18 yards, 16 yards after the catch, two touchdowns, one interception, two pass breakups, and an opponent passer rating of 46.6.

It’s especially fun when Mustapha and Green get together to bounce opposing targets right out of the club!

Round 4, Pick 129: RB Isaac Guerendo

As was often said of the run games designed by Kyle Shanahan’s father Mike back in the day, the 49ers absolutely have a knack for creating success for anybody getting the ball in their backfields. That’s been true of Jordan Mason as Christian McCaffrey’s primary injury replacement this season, and it’s also been true of Isaac Guerendo, the 6-foot-0, 221-pound Louisville alum who set the scouting combine alight with a 4.33-second 40-yard dash that was in the 98th percentile for running backs since 1999.

That size/speed combination first showed up for real on this 76-yard run against the Seahawks…

… and it reared its head once again last Sunday against Dallas’ misbegotten run defense – for which Guerendo made SB Nation’s Secret Superstars team.

Yes, the Shanahan run game is a cheat code, but the running back in question still has to have the answers to the test. Guerendo clearly does.

It’s obviously far too early to classify this draft class as one of the best in recent NFL history, right up there with the 1974 Pittsburgh Steelers, the 1995 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the 1996 Baltimore Ravens, the 2012 Seattle Seahawks, or the 2017 New Orleans Saints. But there’s plenty of time for that kind of speculation years down the road. The most important thing for the 2024 49ers, and for any team that nails a draft to this degree, is that it can take a closing competitive window and bust it wide open for seasons to come.

Right now, that looks to be exactly what these 49ers have done.