Kyle Shanahan explains why 49ers didn't achieve 1st goal in NFL draft

The San Francisco 49ers weren't able to accomplish their No. 1 goal in the 2026 NFL draft according to head coach Kyle Shanahan. Fortunately for the team, they had a backup plan they were able to execute.

Shanahan in an appearance on the Rich Eisen Show explained how the 49ers had a handful of targets they wanted to select with the No. 27 overall pick. When none of those players fell to them, the club pivoted to their Plan B, which included a slew of trades back to acquire more capital in the areas of the draft they felt were the strongest.

"It was a long process to get therem" Shanahan said. "There's a lot of good receivers in the draft. We weren't for sure gonna go receiver either. We knew we would like to, but there was a lot of positions we would like to. We targeted everything at 27. You always have an idea of who might be there, who you're hoping to be there. There's a couple guys we hoped would be there, but we knew there was a possibility that they wouldn't. There's a couple guys we weren't gonna move for. We thought if they fell to 27 it didn't matter who was on the phones, we were gonna turn it in right then. We had a feeling odds were those guys weren't gonna be there.

"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," Shanahan said. "We would've taken Stribling at 30 if we had to pick. But to get to 33, still get the guy we wanted — the thing I was most nervous about going into the draft is — we only had six picks. We traded a third for Osa from Dallas. So we had a first-round pick, a second-round pick, and we had four fourths. So we had six picks going in there, and we felt the strength of this draft was really the second round to the end of the third and we only had one pick there."

The 49ers' trades back landed them a pick in Round 2, two Round 3 choices and a pair of picks in Round 5. The 49ers went from have six picks entering the draft to finishing the three-day session with eight selections. Getting to those eight picks instead of having six or fewer was a priority for Shanahan and the 49ers.