Originally posted by mike86:
One of the most prominent clichés in life and sports, especially, is that hindsight is 20/20. The Niners thought they were making sound decisions after coming up just short in the SuperBowl. Midway through the 2020 season however a combination of bad luck (errr historically bad luck with injuries) and bad decisions are costing this team dearly. The problem is bad decisions in personnel matters aren't one-time taxes, they impose costs on the team for many years to come and I'm afraid the 49ers front office made several cataclysmic manuevers that will be very hard to recover from.
It's not a good use of time to stew over these poor choices and replay what-might-have been scenarios, but it could all be so so different now.
Let's replay what the 49ers did in the spring of 2020. To me, it ultimately comes down to one central decision...
Faced with the choice to resign their budding Pro Bowl DT, Deforest Buckner, the team's most consistent player and leader on defense, or spread that money around to several positions, the 49ers fooled themselves.
Buckner is NOT Aaron Donald, he's not even quite in Chris Jones territory, but he is a top 5 DT with a non-stop motor, leadership skills who NEVER misses time to injury. Simply put, there are almost no players who can match his level of availability, productivity and leadership. What would it have taken for the 49ers to keep him? I suspect an extension for 4 years at $80M would've done it.
Now this decision would've invariably had downstream consequences. Almost assuredly the 49ers would have needed to let Jimmie Ward walk in FA. More likely than not, they would have had to franchise and then trade Arik Armstead.
OR, they could have just cut Dee Ford. The 49ers gambled on Ford and when he played the 49ers pass rush was historic. Yes, they sacrificed a late 2nd round pick but that was a sunk cost. Keeping a DE on the downside of his career who hasn't had played more than two entire seasons ever on the roster at $18M per year made NO SENSE. And yet, to save face, the 49ers gambled. They believed that a healthy* Ford + Bosa + Armstead would be enough. Maybe they could've been right, but by what we're seeing now they were woefully wrong.
Now the 49ers are saddled with 3 terrible contracts. Jimmie Ward is a middling FS at best. Dee Ford may likely never see the field again. Armstead I still believe is a talented player, but he better be your 2nd or 3rd best DL, not your go-to guy (which he is right now).
The 49ers combined cap hit for these three players will be $44.2M in 2021, representing more than a QUARTER of the projected cap. It gets worse, in 2022, these cap numbers climb to $53.2M.
The 49ers paid these players like stars. They are not stars. They are all flawed players who, when everything lines up just so, can play at close to an elite level. The real star, however, was DeForest Buckner and the 49ers thought they could save $2-3M per year by signing Armstead and using those incremental dollars to keep Jimmie Ward. BRUTAL.
Now what could / should have they done?
At very least, they should have NEVER restructured Dee Ford's deal to convert his 2021 base salary into a bonus. That way they could've at least gotten out of his contract after this year w/ no financial ramifications. Whoops...
What they really should have done was trade Dee Ford after the season for a 5th or 6th round pick and move on from his salary.
Then, they should have then signed Buckner to a 4 year $80M extension, letting him play this year on his 5th year option.
The savings from trading Ford should, hypothetically, allowed the 49ers to keep Armstead OR Jimmie Ward in 2020, if not both.
So, the 49ers could have have Franchised Arik Armstead and then tried to sign him to a longer term deal OR traded him for a 2nd Round Pick in the draft.
IF, the 49ers traded Armstead, they could have resigned Jimmie Ward walk but the right move would have been to let him walk in FA and received a 3rd or 4th round compensatory pick in this year's draft.
If Ward was let go and Armstead was traded, the 49ers could have moved up in the 2nd Round to S Antoine Winfield Jr. to become the starting FS for this team.
Had they done this, the 49ers defensive nucleus going into 2021 would be Buckner, Bosa, Warner and Winfield. That's ELITE talent at every level.
They would also have MUCH more financial flexibility to resign Trent Williams AND Fred Warner.
Instead, this team is less talented and much more financially strapped.
These were EGREGIOUS decisions that at least put John Lynch's job into question. Instead he got rewarded with a five year extension...
These are the same tired arguments that have gotten rehashed in thread after thread. The team felt they had to make a choice whether to sign Buckner or not, they decided not to so that they could have a little more flexibility in managing their cap. Ford has been an asset when he has been on the field. It is difficult to deny that Bosa was much more effective when Ford was playing than when Ford was out and Buckner was still playing. Yeah, it sucks that he has been hurt so much but that doesn't necessarily mean it was a bad signing. He delivers exactly what they are looking for when he can play and they went into the year thinking they had addressed the knee issues that limited him last year. That he has issues with his back is unfortunate but I don't think that it's anything that several other teams haven't had to deal with through the years or that it can necessarily be construed as an error by the GM. Except with the benefit of hindsight, which of course is what many of the posters in here specialize in. Wasn't there some cartoon show that had a recurring character called Caption Obvious who always shows up after some catastrophe and points out what people should have done. That's what a lot of these posts remind me of
Also with all of the injuries the team has had this year I hardly think that having Buckner in the line-up rather than Kinlaw would have made much difference in the team's current win/loss record. Buckner was a steady, reliable, 100% effort guy whenever he was on the field. A great 49er. I don't know that he is really a consistent game changer though in the way that Aaron Donald has shown himself to be. They made a calculated decision to move on from him in the hope that Kinlaw would be able to replace some of his production. Given the general s**t storm this season has turned out to be things haven't quite worked out that way. Without training camp and all of the limitations that may have imposed on their strength and conditioning programs Kinlaw perhaps isn't as far along as he might have been. Without Ford and Bosa, Armstead probably isn't as effective as he should be. I do agree though that if the team is paying him like a star then he needs to play like one more frequently but this year has been jacked up since the git go so I am willing to cut him a little slack.
As for Ward, the team likes him, what can I say. They certainly kept faith with him when he was hurt all those years and it paid off last year when he played really well and so they decided to reward him. I assume that part of that decision had to do with the fact that every other starter in their backfield was due for free agency at the end of this season and they saw Ward as someone who could provide them with some stability and continuity back there. I doubt any of the choices they make are done in a vacuum where they are just concentrating on one particular piece of the puzzle. They are looking at how all of it fits together and I suspect that their view of the board is rather different from the view you get from the stands.
