From West Valley To 49ers, Just Like That After One Year As Byu Starter, Hanshaw Drafted By Nfl’s Best

Tim Hanshaw approached the NFL draft with confidence.

Confidence that he’d end up a free agent.

Pro Football Weekly, for instance, had the West Valley High grad ranked as the 54th-best guard available in the draft. After all, he’d only started one season at Brigham Young.

Generally, players with those credentials are highly sought - as insurance salesmen or purveyors of previously owned automobiles.

But by the time the teams had divvied up prospects last weekend, Hanshaw was property of the World Champion San Francisco 49ers.

More impressively, he was the second player the Niners took in the draft, going in the fourth round - the eighth guard taken.

And the fact that it was the prescient 49ers who plucked Hanshaw leads observers to believe the so-called experts had drastically under-evaluated a promising talent.

“After the season was over, I didn’t have any idea that things would turn out so well,” Hanshaw said from Provo, where he was about to spend Tuesday afternoon in the weight room.

San Francisco line coach Bobb McKittrick suggests that the Niners got a steal in Hanshaw.

“This was his first year (starting) fulltime, so a lot of people didn’t know him,” said McKittrick, who claimed that Hanshaw was rated the 32nd-best player in the draft by the 49ers.

But Hanshaw and wife Rachelle would not allow themselves to be too optimistic about the draft.

“We’ve known a lot of people who expected to get drafted and didn’t, so we were very cautious,” Rachelle Hanshaw said. “I think he was thinking it wouldn’t happen. He was confident he’d sign on as a free agent, and then maybe if he was really lucky somebody would call in the sixth or seventh round.”

Hanshaw was not invited to the scouting combine in Indianapolis, but began attracting serious attention “when teams started coming to work me out in the beginning of March,” he said. “I ran some good 40s and showed some good quickness, and after that they went back and started looking at the films some more.”

What they saw was a 6-foot-5, 290-pounder who had played guard, tackle, tight end and blocking back.

His ability to get out and run on sweeps - a requirement for Niners linemen - was another convincing attribute.

Hanshaw expected to be used as a guard.

“I remember way back at West Valley, I had high hopes that some day I’d be able to play at this level,” Hanshaw said. “That’s been a long time about, but things are working out.”

Part of Hanshaw’s belief in himself came from seeing high school contemporary Steve Emtman come out of Washington as the No. 1 choice in the 1992 draft.

Emtman and Hanshaw shared Frontier League lineman-of-theyear honors their senior seasons.

“We went together neck-toneck in football, basketball and track every year,” Hanshaw said. “I think Steve’s successes in some ways helped me out - thinking us guys from little Spokane can make it. There was some feeling that if he can do it, I can do it.”

Hanshaw, who turns 25 Thursday, put his career on hold for two years to serve a Mormon mission to Sweden.

His weight dropped from 270 to 220 during that span. “I had to work my rear end off to get it back,” Hanshaw said. “But it was a neat experience to get to go to a foreign country and learn a language and speak with them about something that was very important to me.”

His BYU teammate Eli Herring recently drew attention by turning his back on the NFL because he felt Sunday games would conflict with his religious convictions. The Raiders drafted him anyway.

Hanshaw and Herring are close friends, but Hanshaw will have no problem playing on Sundays.