San Francisco 49ers: Redrafting Trent Baalke’s 2016 NFL Draft Class

Niner Noise plays some revisionist history and redrafts the San Francisco 49ers’ 2016 NFL Draft class, which was the last under former general manager Trent Baalke.

The 2017 San Francisco 49ers are in the first year of what looks to be a very long rebuild, largely in place because of the multi-year failures from former general manager Trent Baalke.

I’ve criticized Baalke enough before and since his January firing, and it’s pretty clear his attempts to maintain the franchise from its most-recent heydays fell far short.

Baalke’s 2016 NFL Draft class was no exception.

San Francisco 49ers

Rather than continue jumping on Baalke and his mistakes — we’ve done that already — let’s simply look back to last year and see what could have been done differently.

In this slideshow, we’ll redraft the entire seven rounds from 2016, selecting players who probably would have been better fits for San Francisco. Sure, we get the whole “hindsight is 20-20” argument. That’s the point here. And while we’ll never know if the redrafted prospects would have actually worked within the Niners’ system, it’s at least fun to speculate based off what the new selections could have done if the 49ers landed them.

For the sake of clarity, we won’t introduce any trades from San Francisco’s vantage point. But we can cross off ones Baalke actually made during the draft.

So let’s get started with the Niners’ first-overall pick in 2016 — one that we won’t change, defensive tackle DeForest Buckner.