49ers hire John Lynch to be Kyle Shanahan’s GM in San Francisco

The 49ers lured away Kyle Shanahan from the Atlanta Falcons, a team he had found wild and unbridled offensive success with, via a series of smart, cunning moves universally praised by football pundits.

Nah, I’m just screwing with you. They hired John Lynch as their general manager.

This is hilariously stupid, regardless of whether it ends up working out or not. Shanahan is a first time head coach taking over a dysfunctional team with a weak roster, and regardless of his offensive wizardry, he could really use a veteran general manager or at least a very bright personnel mind. There’s reports that Lynch is going to hire such a personnel man to be his #2, but it really seems weird and unnecessarily difficult to fix this team with a former player and announcer who has never dabbled in personnel as your general manager. The whole situation is profoundly odd.

Of course, Shanahan has a ton of cap room to work with and a quality set of draft picks, so maybe he just needs Lynch to light up the room with his smile during negotiations. I’m still trying to process this.

There’s still a small but extremely remote possibility that Kyle Shanahan bolts upright in the middle of the night and calls San Francisco to say he doesn’t want the job, it appears otherwise he’ll be trying to pull off a tremendous rebuild gig with John Lynch as his GM. We wish him well.