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Why Kyle Shanahan Can Afford to Take a Big Risk with the No. 3 Pick

For all intents and purposes, Shanahan is playing craps in Las Vegas with Jed York's money. And Shanahan has tons of chips on the table. We're talking side bets up the wazoo. Hard 8s. You name it.
Grant Cohn|
Why Kyle Shanahan Can Afford to Take a Big Risk with the No. 3 Pick
Why Kyle Shanahan Can Afford to Take a Big Risk with the No. 3 Pick

Kyle Shanahan did not gamble his future by trading up for the No. 3 pick in next week's draft.

He gambled the 49ers' future.

Kyle Shanahan has taken no risk -- Jed York and Paraag Marathe have taken it. Because if the trade doesn't work out, and the quarterback they take with the No. 3 pick is a bust, and then the 49ers get rid of Shanahan, plenty of teams would line up to hire him as their next head coach. He'd be out of job for 20 minutes, while the 49ers would be stuck dealing with the fallout from this trade.

For all intents and purposes, Shanahan is playing craps in Las Vegas with Jed York's money. And Shanahan has tons of chips on the table. We're talking side bets up the wazoo. Hard 8s. You name it. And if he rolls a 7 and craps out, York's bank account will take the hit, not Shanahan's. And so if York ever loses confidence in Shanahan and cuts him off, some other NFL team will bankroll him, and Shanahan will keep his place at the dice table.

Which means Shanahan can afford to take the biggest risk imaginable with the No. 3 pick. If he thinks Trey Lance or Justin Fields has a chance to be great, but an equal chance to be awful, Shanahan can make that pick. And if Lance or Fields turns out to be awful, that's York's problem. Shanahan can go to a new team and pick a new quarterback and still have decades remaining in his NFL career.

Shanahan has nothing to lose.

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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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