Ahead of the 2022 NFL Trade Deadline, the San Francisco 49ers made a big move by acquiring Christian McCaffrey. This year, they tried that again, and the result was Chase Young.
General manager John Lynch said this week that the team had other offers it wanted to attack before the deadline, but decided to move forward with the Chase Young deal.
“Because I felt like it was the best deal to be had,” Lynch said, via 49ersWebzone.com. “We had a number of conversations, and we’ve always been of the philosophy that it starts up front, and that was the deal that made the most sense for us.”
The former No. 2 overall pick in the 2020 draft was raved about as the possible next Myles Garrett or Aaron Donald. Chase Young’s struggled with injury, and is going to be a free agent this coming offseason, which is in part why the Washington Commanders traded him.
On the other hand, the 49ers defense has been struggling, especially with the team losing its last three games in a row. Lynch believes that Young is the “complete player” and why it made sense for the team to trade for him.
“In the NFL, you’ve got to earn the right to rush the passer, and you do that by playing the run well, and we’ve not been good enough there,” Lynch said. “So I think when we start doing the little things right, that gives you the opportunities, and ultimately, I think we’re going to get this thing right and all those things.
“ But that definitely is true. We’ve got to shore that up. It starts with stopping the run, and we haven’t been doing that well enough, so we got to do that. And then we got ample ability and options as pass rushers to start to pull this together.”
Young will try and get acclimated over the bye week and we will hopefully get to see if this trade was what the 49ers needed, against the Jacksonville Jaguars in Week 10.
