I've always contended it was Scott not Pete. Scott loaded that 49ers team with All Pros too. Then he came here and knocked it out of the park. Heck, even the Redskins (now the WFT) got a number of ballers from drafts he had a hand in.
It might not have been Scott, maybe it was someone that worked for him, but either way - when Scott left, so did 80-90% of our magic in the draft. We still hit on a few here and there but it was far less effective than what Scott ended up doing at his next stop.
At FIRST, the excuse was that we were 'a good team and you cannot expect much from the draft picks when we have to constantly be picking close to the bottom of the 1st'. (This excuse neglected the reality that in Scott's years here, he got a number of fantastic players in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and even 6th rounds. Heck, the 5th round was normally our magic round.)
Then, people preached patience - that Carrol 'knew what he was doing' and that he was going to develop another set of studs like he did last time.
Now, apparently it is all the fault of JS. Whatever. Carrol is supposedly at the wheel and repeatedly crashing into the rocks in the draft as soon as Scott left. It was probably mostly Scott, as I said at the time.
Not sure many, if any, draft successes from the SB runs were Carroll picks at all. So giving him credit for that in order to make his current failures look less terrible? Seems pretty desperate. He gets credit for hiring Scott and running an org that drafted well with Scott. But losing Scott screwed him.