NFL draft grades are a popular exercise immediately following a draft. Those grades are distributed based on guesses about how college prospects will convert to the NFL. While that’s a fun projection exercise, they don’t mean a ton in the scope of a player’s career.
What we like to do here is re-grade a draft once the players have three full NFL seasons under their belts. It allows a large enough sample size to give a grade to the pick based on actual NFL production.
The Trey Lance draft wound up being a fascinating one for the 49ers because it’s a little backward. The top of their draft class isn’t awesome, but they hit some home runs later in the process.
Here are the new grades of the 49ers’ 2021 class: