Kwesi Adofo-Mensah remembers the tense moments before draft meetings. He was the analytics guy about to go into those conference rooms with coaches and scouts, with beliefs hardened by years on the field and the road. He knew his reports would be picked apart. He knew his data might come under tighter scrutiny than anyone’s.
“I would be almost sick before the meetings because I knew I had to go stand in front of a room, I knew I would be challenged,” says Adofo-Mensah, then 49ers director of football research, now the Vikings GM. “But ultimately, that made me better. It sucked at the time. You wish everybody would just say, . They would challenge you. I remember one time [Robert] Saleh and Bobby Slowik—again, talk about all the people I got to work with, Saleh and Bobby Slowik—asked me something about one of the things we do with pass rushers and they said, .
“They almost want to do the analysis themselves to confirm it. I always appreciated it. They trusted me enough to ask that second question. Now, that's their knowledge. And now, it's our knowledge.”
This is Year 7 for Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch in San Francisco.
They’ve been to four NFC title games, two Super Bowls and will try to win their first Lombardi Trophy on Sunday against the Kansas City Chiefs. They’ve built this team from the ground up, taking over a broken football operation and building back to the Niners’ old standard, in Lynch’s words, brick by brick. There are a lot of reasons for that—Shanahan’s coaching brilliance, the job Lynch’s staff has done picking players and the job the players have done among them.
But there’s one overarching thing that can tie all of it together. The Niners have been elite at developing . It’s not just players. It’s people, in general. Scouts. Coaches. Analytics folks. And as a result, in a league full of owners lusting after the idea of manufacturing a setup to make their franchises the Apple of pro football, the Niners have organically become just that—a forward-thinking, efficient, and self-sustaining operation.
They can lose Adofo-Mensah, Martin Mayhew, Ran Carthon and now Adam Peters on the personnel side to GM jobs, and Saleh, Mike McDaniel, DeMeco Ryans, Mike LaFleur and soon Klint Kubiak to coaching promotions, and not just survive, but maintain the standard that’s been set over the past decade. And it’s because of stories like Adofo-Mensah’s.
It’s an environment that’s identified, educated, and pushed young people, and kept churning them out so when those young people leave, more are there to replace them.
It’s why the Niners are here again, four years after taking about as crushing a loss as is imaginable in football. It’s also why, even with some aging players and a looming cap crunch, it’d be silly to think they won’t be back again soon.
