Could Mac Jones Be the Next Sam Darnold? QB Guru John Beck Weighs In

Rich has a hypothesis and he wants John Beck to validate it. If Sam Darnold can win a Super Bowl after years of being written off, who's the next guy hiding in plain sight? Rich already has his pick. Mac Jones.

Beck doesn't flinch. He was there on draft day in 2021 when San Francisco was on the clock at three, and while he can't say everything because of his relationship with Kyle Shanahan, he tips enough. He thought Mac was potentially going to be the Niner right then. Instead of Trey Lance. Nothing against Trey, Beck says, he loves Trey, has worked with him. But Beck saw enough of Kyle's quarterback history, especially the Kirk Cousins years, to think Mac was the cleaner fit for that system.

Then Mac actually got to play in San Francisco when Brock Purdy went down. Beck saw what he could do in that offense. And then he ticks off the obvious. How many teams in the NFL are running some version of that scheme? Mac would fit a lot of rooms.

The parallel to Darnold is the part Beck wants to underline. Experience is something you can't manufacture. You can't hand it out. Mac is a former first-round pick (not as high as Sam, Beck notes), he's about to land on team four, and he's got the Shanahan touch the same way Darnold did before Minnesota. The opportunity is somewhere out there. Beck doesn't know where. He doesn't know when. But if he were the 49ers, he wouldn't move Mac at all.

That's where Rich pushes. If you bring Trent Williams back and you still believe you've got a Super Bowl roster, you better have a real quarterback behind your starter. Beck nods and tells the story directly. He was on a team once and got told to his face that they were bringing somebody in over him, because he hadn't played in postseason games and they believed they had a Super Bowl roster. They needed a guy who'd been there.

Rich runs with it. Nobody knows the value of QB depth like the 49ers. The team whose starter was option three. The Lance pick, then Jimmy G has to stick around, then Jimmy goes down, then it's Brock, and look who's quarterbacking that team now. Beck agrees that more teams are going to start treating veteran QB depth as a real roster move, not a luxury. Cheaper than paying a draft pick fifty-plus million just because it's his rookie deal turning over. Mac, Beck and Rich both think, is the cleanest version of that bet sitting on the market.