Analyzing why the San Francisco 49ers might trade Brandon Aiyuk.
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00:00 Now we gotta talk business. Niners have some serious decisions to make moving forward. Brandon Ayuk not gonna be cheap. All pro wide receiver means he's one of the top seven dudes in the league.
00:10 He's not gonna, I don't think he's gonna give the Niners a bargain either. 25 million plus a year. Are the Niners prepared to pay it? What are the pros and cons? How do you see this ending up?
00:22 I think they have to because Ayuk is so central to what they do. That you've got the wide receiver that blocks so well and that has a chemistry with Purdy.
00:32 And he fits everything they do. The team culture they want, the effort, the work ethic, it's all there. The skills and he's ascending. He's an ascending player, he's getting better.
00:42 And so you have to keep him. But if you're Ayuk, you're gonna say, look, I'm better than Debo. I want more money than him. And so the question is, are the Niners prepared to do that?
00:52 I think they're gonna have to because if you don't have Ayuk, then what? You're gonna trade him and then you get a pick back?
00:59 Now you don't have anyone who can beat man to man coverage at wide receiver on your team.
01:03 Right. You've got your best route runner, your best separator. You can't get rid of him. You can't afford to.
01:09 Can't afford to. Absolutely can't afford to. I mean, only thing is that he's gonna be really expensive and I think the Niners could do what they did with Buckner.
01:19 Where they're like, look, we love him. Nothing against this guy. But it's math. Should we spend, you know, $20, $50 million a year on two wide receivers when we don't throw that much?
01:31 In fact, we throw less than every other team in the league. Or should we trade Brandon Ayuk for a pick and draft another wide receiver?
01:37 Like that's what they tried to do with Buckner. Didn't work out, but they could try again a wide receiver.
01:43 Well, it's also what they did with Trent Brown. So they've tried this twice and it's failed completely. And now you're gonna try it a third time? Good luck.
01:50 Now, I understand that there's a lot of wide receivers that are very good, but if you get rid of Ayuk, you lose a lot of what he can only do.
02:00 The route running, the separation, the chemistry with Purdy, all of that is specific to Ayuk. Can you get a rookie that can do the same thing? Probably not.
02:09 And is he somebody that can learn the system quickly? The other factor is that this is Purdy's final year.
02:18 This is essentially your do or die year because then you got to pay Purdy and then what?
02:24 So I think that they have to go all in in this coming year, which is another reason why you keep Ayuk.
02:30 Because given how fond they are of red shirting rookies, what kind of impact are you going to get from a rookie receiver if they're not willing to play him heavily to begin with?
02:42 Let me argue why they shouldn't pay Ayuk. They're never going to give him enough targets to justify it. They won't.
02:53 I mean, he's great on another offense, getting 150 targets a season, he'd be worth it. But on this team, in this offense, they're never going to optimize him.
03:03 That's true. But even the unoptimized Ayuk is vital to their offense. If you take him out, the offense drops off a cliff.
03:15 Because you lose the blocking, you lose the ability to have a receiver that can beat a great cover corner.
03:24 You don't have it. You're going to put Debo on a great cover corner. We already saw what happened there.
03:29 The problem is that you pay Debo, and then it's hard to move Debo.
03:35 It's like, okay, yeah, Ayuk's worth it, but $50 million between two wide receivers on a team that throws the ball less than every other team in the league.
03:43 You're never going to get your bang for your buck spending all that money on a team that's throwing to tight ends and running backs and running the ball.
03:50 We'll talk about potentially moving Debo in a minute, but if they can't figure that out and they feel like that would hurt their financial whatever, the easy way financially is trading Ayuk.
04:04 And if there's some wide receiver they fall in love with in the first round, gotta remember they drafted Ayuk in the back end of the first round too.
04:11 So they do have some credibility built up there.
04:17 Yeah, yeah, they've proven that they can at least identify somebody.
04:21 They identified Debo. They identified Ayuk.
04:24 So they can, unlike Balky, figure out who's a good receiver.
04:30 So that helps.
04:32 I just don't understand why they didn't feature him more.
04:35 If they didn't feature him so much in the playoffs, why are they going to give him $25 million now?
04:40 Because they can't afford not to because the offense productivity takes too big a hit.
04:46 But the problem is that you made the initial mistake with Debo and so you're locked in.
04:51 I think we should start looking at potential wide receivers.
04:55 Oh, I am. I'm looking at receivers in the draft and seeing what they can do.
04:59 Who's a good blocking receiver?
05:01 Who puts in the effort? Who's somebody that could potentially be in Ayuk for them?
05:07 And so I'll talk about that next week.
05:10 I'll have a draft piece on that specifically that if they trade Ayuk, then what?
05:14 And I'll go through the scenarios.
05:16 And remember, after they lost the Super Bowl last year, one of the first things they did was swap out their split end.
05:23 Get rid of Emmanuel Sanders and bring in Brandon Ayuk.
05:25 So this is something they've done before.
05:27 I wonder if they feel like the ex-receiver is a little bit on his own.
05:30 He doesn't really go in motion very much.
05:32 Maybe it's a little simpler. I don't know.
05:35 Well, it could be, but Sanders was at the end of his career.
05:38 It's a different thing. He just wasn't going to play anymore.
05:40 Ayuk is 25. He's still got a lot of years left in the league.
05:44 So that's a different situation.
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