The 49ers passed again on adding help in their secondary during the 2019 Supplemental Draft.
The Supplemental Draft is a secondary draft for players who didn’t declare for the draft. Entrants generally didn’t intend to enter the draft, but run into some sort of NCAA eligibility issue where a move to the NFL is more beneficial than staying in college. Players still have to follow the NFL’s draft rules and be three years removed from college.
Teams bid on players using their draft selections for the following year. So if a team selects a player in the fourth round of the Supplemental Draft, they’ll lose their fourth-round pick in the next year’s draft.
It’s a sparsely used method of player acquisition, but an intriguing defensive back prospect was available this year. Washington State safety Jalen Thompson was the lone player taken. It’s become a trend for the 49ers to skip on adding new members to their secondary this offseason though, and it wasn’t likely they were suddenly going to use a pick in next year’s draft to acquire a defensive back.
The Cardinals scooped Thompson up in the fifth round. He with the Cougars for three years. The 6-foot, 190-pound safety played in 39 games with 190 tackles, 11.5 tackles for loss and six interceptions.
San Francisco’s front office and coaching staff expressed a lot of confidence in their defensive backs this offseason by re-signing safeties Jimmie Ward and Antone Exum to one-year deals, and making oft-injured free agent Jason Verrett and sixth-round pick Tim Harris their only real investment in new corners.
If the experiment doesn’t work, they’ll be addressing their needs early in next year’s draft. With a second-round pick in 2020 already sent to Kansas City in the Dee Ford trade in March, unloading another pick before the 2019 season even began didn’t seem very likely.
The 49ers are ready to go into 2019 with largely the same group of defensive backs that spearheaded arguably the NFL’s worst pass defense from a season ago. They didn’t seem eager to make changes any other time during the offseason, so their inactivity in the Supplemental Draft makes plenty of sense.
