The NFL draft is a chaotic three-day exercise in collective delusion — a time when we all pretend to know exactly how 21-year-olds will adapt to playing against grown men, and how grown men will adapt to not playing against 21-year-olds.

(College football is weird these days.)

So we spend months agonizing over mock drafts, building elaborate big boards, screaming into the void about “needs,” and convincing ourselves that a somewhat heralded guard from the American Athletic Conference is the missing piece to a Super Bowl run.

And then there’s John Lynch.

Sitting at the dais in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday, the San Francisco 49ers’ general manager looked like a man who had just found a crisp $20 bill, effectively said what people in the league have been saying (at least to me) for weeks:

The 49ers are going to let this draft “come to them”.

To use the GM’s exact phrasing from his press conference, the team handling their business in the first portion of the offseason “probably leaves you a little more comfortable in various scenarios.”

In other words: We’re chilling, guys. At pick No. 27, “various scenarios” is front-office speak for a near-infinite amount of possibilities the draft presents, even at that relatively early juncture.

When you are picking that close to the bottom of the first round, the board rarely — no, never — falls the way the Mel Kipers of the world predict. It’s less of an exact science and more of a drunken, panicked game of Plinko.

Being the only draft room come Thursday without ever-expanding, collective pit stains is a massive competitive advantage.

Here’s the reality for San Francisco: By the time Roger Goodell waddles up to the podium for the 27th time on Thursday night, in all likelihood, there will be three or four players sitting there that the 49ers genuinely like and feel completely comfortable taking. And they’ll simply take one of them.

Are they targeting a single position? Do they have a singular, shiny player locked in their crosshairs to fix a glaring hole?

Please. That’s a desperation play.

Right now, desperation is not something the 49ers are feeling. “There’s not a ton of needs,” Lynch said Monday. As he explained, the goal is to “position your team such that you just don’t have glaring holes where, like, we have to take this position”.

And he’s right. The Niners are in such a position.

While there are a ton of places the Niners could go with pick No. 27 — no team can be too deep — there isn’t a single place the 49ers need to go with their first-round pick (or their second or fourth-round picks). It’s a subtle difference in language, but a massive one in the world of the draft.

They’re in such a good place, they don’t even need to make a first-round pick. If they don’t like the board at 27, they’ll just bounce.

That’s right, prepare yourselves for the ever-thrilling trade-down.

Lynch acknowledged as much, stating the obvious: “We don’t have a ton of picks in this draft, so it does make some sense … How can we find some more picks? We’ll certainly be open to that.”

If you’ve been paying attention to the pre-draft chatter, the consensus is that the talent gap between pick 15 (maybe even the top 10) and roughly pick 50 in this year’s draft is essentially a rounding error. Lynch agreed, noting that “the top half of the first round probably runs out a little quicker in terms of what people deem true impact players.”

Then comes a massive, flat second tier of prospects. At least in my eyes. In Lynch’s, “it gets somewhat homogeneous after that, and then it’s what’s your flavor, what are you looking for?”

So, I’d like to extend my deepest, most insincere apologies to all the amateur mock drafters who have been salivating over a shiny new “Trent Williams replacement” in the first round.

Sure, the Niners could go that way. There is plenty of smoke billowing out of Santa Clara about Utah tackle Caleb Lomu being a target at No. 27.

But he is hardly the only player they like.

And they are emphatically, positively not boxed into anything.

They aren’t boxed in because they are operating from a position of absolute power.

It’s a position that was meticulously earned. They paid for it, in fact.

This offseason, the Niners were active and surgical in free agency. They drafted well last year (yes, contrary to the popular, loud, and almost-always wrong belief on social media).

And, most crucially, they took care of business by re-signing Williams four days before the draft, a move that created a palpable “buzz in the building,” per Lynch, and ensures a Hall of Fame talent remains in the fold for both this year and next.

Not that the Niners ever planned on not having Williams in the fold.

It’s a luxurious position they definitely were not in last year, when every pick felt like a high-stakes referendum on the franchise’s future.

So go ahead, keep guessing, folks. Fire up your 14th mock draft of the week. Post your multi-trade, tin-foil-hat scenarios online.

Just know that the 49ers are guessing, too. There are 26 unpredictable, panic-induced picks ahead of them.

Good luck figuring out the chaotic math of who will and will not be on the board by the time the Niners finally go on the clock.

But amid all this uncertainty, we actually do know exactly who the Niners will pick with pick No. 27: The best player, with little regard to “need” and “position.”

It’s the smart play. It’s the winning play. And right now, it’s the only play the 49ers have to make.

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