San Francisco 49ers: Analyzing the 2018 rookie NFL Draft class one year later

The San Francisco 49ers’ 2018 rookie class made some strong contributions to the team last season. Here, Niner Noise looks back on who had the biggest impacts, and how they were ranked in a prediction article last year.

In the past few seasons, a common link for the San Francisco 49ers is the high amount of contributions the rookie classes have made, whether they be from the early rounds, late rounds or even undrafted.

For the last two draft classes, I’ve made predictions on who would be the biggest contributors to the team for their rookie seasons. You can see the one for the Niners’ most recent class on the link below:

For obvious reasons, it’s way too soon to be looking at my rankings for them. We’ll leave it for next year.

Before training camp, however, I thought it would be a fun idea to go back to my article from last year, and take a look at how the predictions panned out.

Did a rookie perform above expectations, below expectations or did I get them right where I thought they would be?

Of course, this isn’t to be used to say if a player will be good or not for the long term. Players have great starts to their careers and fizzle out, and players sometimes take a bit of time to get going.

But nonetheless, let’s take a look. We’ll be ranking their impact from last season, and taking a look who I put in that particular ranking last year.

Also for simplicity, undrafted free agents were not ranked but only those taken with a 2018 NFL Draft selection. We’ll also take a look at their status within the team right now to see how much of an impact they may have in 2019.