The 49ers almost had a disaster on draft night. While the all-virtual 2020 NFL draft went off without a major hitch, 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan had some issues with his technology. He told Tim Kawakami on the TK Show podcast that he lost his internet connection right before the draft was going to start.
Kawakami asked Shanahan how the virtual draft went after explaining a minor pre-show technical hiccup.
“For the most part it worked great, but I know the feeling you just had because it happened to us about 20 minutes before the draft started,” Shanahan said. “We were all connected and my WiFi went out. I froze and I couldn’t talk to anyone. But fortunately I could still talk to John on the phone and everything while I had an I.T. guy here who’s always helping me out with everything. And he got it fixed before the draft started, but it’d be been good, like, the prior two weeks. Then it shut down for the first time right before the draft.
“I thought it was a bad omen, but it ended up not being and we were alright.”
The pre-draft glitch didn’t wind up impacting the 49ers, and it would’ve been difficult to have a technical issue cause any major problems. Shanahan noted he could still be on the phone to communicate with the front office. Plus, San Francisco didn’t wind up picking until two hours into the draft so there was plenty of time to iron out any internet problems.
Still, having an unforeseen obstacle 20 minutes before the draft couldn’t have been comfortable for the 49ers’ head coach, and needing to deal with that wouldn’t have made a draft where the 49ers were very active in the trade market any easier.
Shanahan and his team avoided disaster just before the draft, and went on to execute a plan that landed them replacements for their two biggest free agent losses, a replacement for the retired Joe Staley, and additional role players to improve their depth. If a brief internet outage winds up being the worst part of the 49ers’ 2020 NFL draft – they’ll take it.
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