I am definitely not a fan of the Gold Diggers. I rooted for them in Super Bowls in the '80s, but in the '90s, I actually found myself rooting for the Cowboys as the best hope to stop the Gold Diggers, and then once the Seahawks moved (back, technically) to the NFC West, I came to dislike the Gold Diggers in a different way. I think my loathing for the Raiders and Broncos is still more visceral, but Rams fans (since the Rams won a Super Bowl, there are now a good ten or twelve Rams fans in the world) and fans of the Gold Diggers are more annoying than fans of the Raiders and Broncos.
I said all that to make it clear that I am not trying to minimize what the Gold Diggers lost in the offseason out of some kind of fondness for the GDs or hope for them to continue being contenders. But c'mon - it's a giant exaggeration to use the words "great players" to describe Ebukam, Mosely, Ward, Al-Shaair, and McGlinchey. They're all good enough to be in the NFL, but I don't think any one of them, much less the five collectively, can be accurately described as "great."
Mosely, Ward, and Al-Shaair haven't even been regular starters. McGlinchey has, but he hasn't been all that good. The OP himself has been quite critical of McGlinchey around here and very obviously didn't think of him as a "great player." Ebukam has been good enough to start on an NFL team, but I don't think many people other than his agent would even think about using "great" to describe his NFL career to this point. He's a decent player at his position, a player who can add to an NFL team's chances of winning, especially at what have been reasonable cap numbers for a decent player at his position, but he's not a "great" player.
As for quarterbacks, I'm glad the 49ers front office wasted huge amounts of draft capital on Lance, but I think Purdy is more relevant at this point. He's a lot cheaper than Lance, about the same age (four months older), and he's actually done a good job as a starter in the NFL for five games. I don't think he's guaranteed (or even all that likely) to continue to be as good going forward as he was over his five NFL starts in 2022, but he's shown much more in actual NFL games than Lance has. While Lance looks nowhere close to being a decent NFL starter and has fully guaranteed cap numbers of $9,301,434 for 2023 and $10,851,673, Purdy has already produced more value on the field in the NFL than his four-year cap number (2022-2025) of $3,737,012.
