During the week leading to the San Francisco 49ers' game against the Buffalo Bills, head coach Kyle Shanahan was asked about Josh Allen and how much homework he did on the quarterback leading to the 2018 draft.
"Not a ton," Shanahan responded. "It was him with a number of other guys, guys I was hoping were going to come out earlier, but they didn't, and so we looked at guys more that year, and next year we had Jimmy [Garoppolo]."
So maybe if Allen had come out a year earlier, it would have been the 49ers, not the Bills, who drafted him.
ESPN insider Adam Schefter joined KNBR on Thursday and shared a story of how that nearly happened. However, it would have involved San Francisco hiring a different general manager.
"They had the opportunity to actually take Josh Allen," Schefter said on the Murph & Mac show. "2017, they're interviewing the great Terry McDonough, (who was) with Arizona's front office, for general manager, a job that went to John Lynch. And let me say, John Lynch, great choice, great man, great everything. Can't go wrong there.
"Terry also is excellent, and Terry would make a great GM somewhere. But Terry was being interviewed for that job, and Terry was with the Niners brass in 2017. It was the year that the Niners were scheduled to have the second overall pick. This actually would have changed a lot of different things.
"And they asked him his plan, and he went on. And Terry was very close with the agent who was going to represent Josh Allen, Todd France. He told the Niners, 'If you hire me as the GM ... that will enable Josh Allen to come out because he will know I will take him at No. 2 because I'm close with his agent.'
"So, the Niners could have hired Terry McDonough and gotten Josh Allen as their quarterback at No. 2, which would have changed, really, the way football unfolded because as it was, they traded the pick to the Bears [who drafted] Mitchell Trubisky, and the Niners would have had Josh Allen with Terry McDonough as their GM, but they went with John Lynch."
That means Monday night could have been Josh Allen and the 49ers going up against the Buffalo Bills in this strange What If? storyline. Instead, Lynch and Shanahan made defensive lineman Solomon Thomas their top pick, and the rest is history.
Allen, by the way, is a California native and grew up a fan of the 49ers.
"I grew up a Niners fan," Allen told Schefter in 2017. "It's about two, two-and-a-half hours from my hometown so it would be easy for my family to commute there. Obviously, they have a long, storied tradition of great quarterbacks with Steve Young, Joe Montana. That's my favorite team and it would be kind of a dream come true to play for them because, growing up, I had a little book with my picture ... there's a face hole and it was the 49ers. You could go find that book and kind of compare it to what could happen next year and that would just be really cool."
You can listen to the entire KNBR interview with Schefter below.
