The 49ers are in the NFC Championship with two first-year starters at guard. That gets lost in the shuffle after what Brock Purdy’s accomplished or the effect Christian McCaffrey’s had offensively.
On Thursday, Kyle Shanahan spoke about his confidence level heading into the season in right guard Aaron Banks. Many on the outside assumed something was wrong with the 2021 second-round pick since he didn’t start as a rookie. Shanahan explained why that wasn’t the case:
No, we had [New York Jets OL] Laken Tomlinson in the last year of his contract, ended up getting I think like a $14 million deal from the Jets and we had a starting right guard in [OL] Daniel Brunskill who we played with three years in a row and we thought he was doing pretty good and we thought we’d give Banks a little bit more time.