The decision to select Trey Lance with the No. 3 pick in the 2021 NFL Draft certainly was not an easy one for Kyle Shanahan and the 49ers.
With multiple other intriguing quarterback prospects on the board, such as Justin Fields and Mac Jones, San Francisco went with Lance, the least experienced of the first-round quarterbacks.
Shanahan joined former NFL players Brandon Marshall and Chad Johnson on an Aug. 8 episode of the "I Am Athlete" podcast, where he was asked about how he came to the decision to select Lance over Jones -- a prospect many had believed was Shanahan's target from the get-go.
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"That's what's funny because everyone wants to know that exact moment ... That moment changes every day because when I have two things I believe in I always check myself a lot," Shanahan said. "I always compare it to how I buy houses. When my wife would bring me to a house she loves, I go through the house and point out every single thing that's wrong with it. Usually, by the end of it, she's in tears and she's apologizing to the realtor for how offensive I've been and then I come out and they're out there and they're like 'what do you think?' and I'm like 'oh I like this one, let's get this' and they're like 'what the hell are you talking about?'
"And I'm like I realize the things that are wrong and I know we can fix those three things so let's go off the potential of this, and that's how I was with him and Mac [Jones] because Mac had so much good stuff on tape the way he played and Trey, I loved what he put on tape, it was a year of football, so it wasn't totally enough, especially the division. But the more you dive into it, the more I got to know the guy, the more I got to find out some stuff about him, the more I believed in what I didn't see and what I believe we will see."
Shanahan clearly takes buying a house and selecting a quarterback very seriously. As he should. The analogy certainly works too, and it makes sense that every single crack in the foundation of both Lance and Jones' games is studied and evaluated to the fullest.
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