Kyle Shanahan on 49ers’ QB situation: ‘We’ll see if we can improve in the draft’

Kyle Shanahan is dealing with something new as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.

He doesn’t have an entrenched, top-fight starting quarterback, as he did as offensive coordinator of the Atlanta Falcons. Matt Ryan was the man, period.

‘I see Brian Hoyer being our starting quarterback going into this’

The 49ers do have a veteran in Brian Hoyer, and Matt Barkley gives them their lone backup at the moment. But all of that will change in the coming weeks.

“I see Brian Hoyer being our starting quarterback going into this, but we’ll see if we can improve in the draft,” Shanahan told Tom Pellissero and Alex Marvez on Late Hits during the NFL meeting in Phoenix. “You never know what happens. You’re going to always try to take the best guy available. I don’t know where that will be, whether that’s the second pick in the draft or any one of our other picks, but we’re still going through that process.

‘You’d like to get those in the draft, but they could come from any aspect’

“We have two on our roster right now. We’ll obviously have more that we’ll take to camp. You’d like to get those in the draft, but they still could come from any aspect of how to do that, whether that’s a trade, whether it’s free agency and they’re still guys available. But we’ll keep trying to improve our team.”

It is quite a departure from what Shanahan experienced with the Falcons. However, the coach has been in the NFL long enough to know that, regardless of who is on the roster, it’s always make sense for a team to do its due diligence when it comes to studying quarterbacks in the draft.

‘It’s something you do every year, even when you’re not planning on adding one’

“We didn’t have to do as much when we had Matt Ryan, but you still go through the process and I’ve done this every year for a long time, whether I was a position coach, a coordinator and now a head coach,” Shanahan said. “It’s something you do every year, even when you’re not planning on adding one, we still do it because it’s how you stack these guys up throughout the years. And you have to learn as a coach and you’ve got to go through the process to see what you like in guys and see how their careers end up, so you can improve from it.

“No one has all the answers, but that’s why we work at it all the time.”