The 49ers twice traded down and out of the first round last Thursday. Their first pick was wide receiver De’Zhaun Stribling with the No. 33 overall pick.
The 49ers have defended their pick of Stribling that high, and coach Kyle Shanahan said on The Rich Eisen Show on Thursday that the team accomplished what it wanted. The 49ers added two picks to their draft class, going from six to eight, and they got the player they would have drafted in the first round with the first pick of the second round.
“That’s kind of what we were hoping for,” Shanahan told Eisen, via David Bonilla of 49erswebzone.com. “Our first goal was that the guy we wanted would fall to 27, but we got our second goal, and that was to trade back twice, accumulate some more picks, and still get the guy.
“We would have taken Stribling at 30, if we had to pick, but to get to 33 and still get the guy we wanted [was ideal]. . . . I think we added eight players who all have a very good chance of making our team, and on top of that, we added a sixth-round pick for next year, which I think’s huge because we didn’t have one.”
Shanahan said the 49ers viewed the second round through the end of the third as the strongest part of the draft. However, the team went into the draft with only one pick in that range after trading its third-rounder for defensive tackle Osa Odighizuwa.
“I was really concerned going into it, because I also felt we needed to add more than six players — not necessarily for this year, but also for next year,” Shanahan said. “All the stuff’s tied together on how many free agents you lose and things like that. So I was worried that if we were going to go get players that we were targeting, we were going to end up using some of our fourth-round picks to come up.”
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