The 49ers are currently slated to pick No. 11 overall in the upcoming 2025 NFL Draft
There’s one game remaining in the regular season. As of now, the 6-10 San Francisco 49ers cannot pick any higher than No. 11 overall in the upcoming 2025 NFL Draft. That means they’ll have their highest draft pick since 2021, when they were slated to pick No. 12, before trading up to No. 3 at the end of March.
The 49ers won’t pick any higher than 11th in the draft because they have the highest strength of schedule in the league. A victory over the Arizona Cardinals would push the 49ers down, but there are endless hypotheticals as to where that’d be.
Let’s pretend like Josh Dobbs, who will start the season-finale, led the Niners to a win. at 7-10, Arizona would still hold the tiebreaker due to a common opponent. But we’d need to go through the schedule of the Indianapolis Colts, who are 4.5-point favorites this week against the Jacksonville Jaguars, as well as the 7-9 Dallas Cowboys, who are only 5-point underdogs this Sunday against the Washington Commanders.
Those two teams are followed by the Cardinals, who are currently picking No. 14 overall in the draft. The good news is every team after Arizona has at least eight wins, so the 49ers wouldn’t fall too far in the draft order with a win.
It’s unfamiliar territory to talk about this team holding a top-15 pick. General manager John Lynch recently said, “It’s not somewhere where we want to be against,” regarding the 49ers’ current record, and the team would fix the issue after they look at the “root causes.” They’ll have plenty of draft picks and cap space to maneuver in free agency to do so.