Kim Klement-USA Sports TODAY
It certainly looks like Fields is the quarterback closest to checking the boxes Shanahan put down. He is big, fast, strong and can sit in the pocket and make throws. His athleticism is an added asset, not the quality on which most of his success depends. Fields has a great arm and uses it from the pocket and on the go when play breaks down. The ability to go off-schedule when needed could quite easily outweigh any advantage another quarterback might have out of the pocket.
That extra layer of speed would be a nightmare for the defense to worry about against a match of the 49ers that is already difficult to defend. Putting one more song into the mix would allow Shanahan to line up more actions that cause mismatches for the 49ers’ line of attack.
An interesting wrinkle to watch is how Lance is factored into the discussion. He is most experienced in play-action passing with his back to the defense. ESPN’s Nick Wagoner tweeted a slew of numbers that indicate Lance’s willingness to play an action game like Shanahan’s is superior to the other signal callers expected to be available when the 49ers dial. Lance checks many of the same boxes Fields does, but his 17 starts at the FCS level, making his pro-readiness a major question mark. Still, it wouldn’t be a big surprise if he made it to third in this year’s version.
While the distinction between Lance and Fields boils down to different nitpicking, what really stands out is where Jones misses in the areas that Shanahan has built. He’s not the biggest, nor the fastest, nor the strongest, and his play from the pocket isn’t so substantially better than the other two that it makes sense to let him lead the way.
Jones seems to fit in with Cousins who mentioned Shanahan when he said he is a quarterback that a team can win with. Jimmy Garoppolo is too. The 49ers are clearly looking for something more than that, and if they weren’t, they might be at number 12 to see if Jones fell, or they found a potential client in round 2 to try to plug in.
So while Shanahan may not have cared enough to let us know who it will be, it seems he has put down some traits that tell us who it won’t be.