49ers CEO Jed York wants you to believe that in the modern NFL, you cannot simultaneously pay a quarterback and spend on free agent players to put around him.
If only that were true.
“When you’re not overly active in [free agency], it gets easy to say ‘Oh, you don’t want to win,’” York told reporters this week at the NFL’s Owners Meetings in Florida. “As we looked at the board there [wasn’t] somebody that we felt made that type of an impact more so than making the decision to try to go pay Brock [Purdy].”
Sounds reasonable, right?
That’s by design. Don’t be fooled. Sadly, the situation isn’t binary.
The idea that you can’t pay a quarterback and the roster around him is antiquated. The NFL’s salary cap has jumped nearly 30 percent since 2022. Quarterback costs have inflated by roughly 25 percent. It’s in that difference that good teams can live.
The 49ers are not such a team.
Let’s establish where the 49ers are and why they’re hanging out there:
Coming off a six-win season, the largest contract the 49ers have divvied out this offseason went to fullback Kyle Juszczyk — someone who was already on their roster and was cut and then subsequently re-signed for… reasons. Instead of simply restructuring his existing contract, the fullback landed a new two-year deal with $7 million in guarantees.
At the same time, the Niners took fire to their roster. And in a vacuum, all of the decisions were justifiable.
But we don’t live in a vacuum, and in reality, you need to put together a competitive football team.
The Niners stand woefully short of being that.
Last season’s Niners were top-heavy to a fault. It was stars and scrubs. The 2023 edition of the Niners was that, too, but that NFC champion team didn’t get burned by injuries like the 2024 edition.
Apparently the lesson gleaned from playing with fire for years and being burned last campaign was to double-down on the scrubs.
Or maybe the Niners’ puzzling offseason to date can simply be explained by York’s desire to not spend cash.
In the NFL, every cent of fully guaranteed money awarded in a contract must be put into an escrow account the day the contract is signed. (A rule put in place by owners, not the collective bargaining agreement.)
And that’s how this all makes sense:
Instead of a typical offseason churn of players in and out, the 49ers opted — or, instead, York mandated — to cut spending and use the savings to spend on Purdy, whose new deal will require at least a $100 million check to be cut when he signs.
At that point, the Niners’ spending will be on par with recent seasons.So adios Deebo Samuel. The 49ers don’t have to cut him another check now that he’s traded. And see you later, Leonard Floyd, who also owed nothing upon being cut.
Yes, both come with big “dead money” hits, but that’s just accounting funny money. It’s about the actual dollars they were on the hook to earn in 2025.
The Niners needed those game checks (and so many others) to be in compliance with the owner’s funding rule on a new Purdy contract.
You can spin York’s spending as being budget-conscious.
Another word for that is cheap.
If York can’t increase the cash budget for a year to sign a franchise quarterback, then his family is not managing its money well enough. I’m not saying that cutting a nine-figure check is easy, but York has been openly talking about paying Purdy for years—a new contract isn’t a surprise.
Yet the escrow check will not come from a special, set-aside fund—it will come from the team’s general coffers.Oh, and another thing:
Purdy hasn’t signed yet, and there’s no guarantee he will.
And because of the roster arson, as it stands, Purdy, who at one point was paid so little on his rookie contract that he literally didn’t count against the 49ers’ salary cap, is the ninth highest-paid player on the Niners.
He’s still playing on his rookie deal.
The Niners are spinning the insane top-heaviness of their roster by saying they’re following the Rams’ model.”That’s a perfect example,” head coach Kyle Shanahan told reporters in Florida.
You might recall that the Rams cleared their books following a five-win season in 2022. They entered the 2023 season with 14 newly acquired draft picks and 36 rookies. That same year, they won 10 games, behind a top-10 offense and a young, burgeoning defense.
It’s easy for the 49ers to think they can do the same thing.
The problem is that the 49ers cannot go back in time and rebuild the infrastructure the Rams had in place.
The Rams drafted better than anyone else in the NFL for a half-decade, even without first-round picks, before that 2023 rebuild.
“We were paying a lot of players, we couldn’t re-sign some of our unrestricted free agents, so.. we would play the comp[ensatory] pick formula game, and we were picking late,” Rams general manager Les Sneed told ESPN’s This is Football Wednesday. “We knew we would have to fill in with our contributors, our depth. Guys who actually finished that Super Bowl [in 2022].”
Sounds familiar, right?
It’s the exact plan the Niners are trying to replicate as a cover for saving cash to complete a Purdy deal.
If only the Niners had that kind of depth to fall back upon. The guys who finished the Super Bowl for the Niners in Feb. 2024 are all veterans on large deals or guys on different teams now.
The Niners had a good draft in 2024. It was their first good draft since 2019. That bad drafting is why the roster was so top-heavy. A bunch of rookies and off-the-street free agents playing is why the Niners only won six games in 2024.
So, calling the Niners’ rebuild a copy of the Rams model is delusional at best and a deliberate smokescreen at worst.
Because the truth remains that a team like the 49ers shouldn’t have to choose between paying their quarterback and paying the rest of the team.
Sure, some sacrifices will have to be made when it comes to spending — there is a salary cap, after all (the 49ers have the fifth-most cap space in the league) — but spending good money on good players is still entirely possible in a league where the cap keeps rising at better-than-expected rates.
The 49ers are citing the Rams because the L.A. model is cheaper.
The Eagles model would have been a viable alternative. It features a top-10 but not quite elite quarterback making big bucks, but it has a Super Bowl ring to show for it because owner Jeffrey Lurie refuses to be cheap.
What did the Eagles do after signing Jalen Hurts to a $255 million deal? They went out and signed the best running back on the market in Saquon Barkley. Yes, they drafted exceptionally well year after year, but they also patched holes with money. The Eagles found ways to spend — while being cap compliant (the Eagles have roughly $150 million more in void-year cap hits than the next closest team) — to ensure there would be no down years in Philadelphia.
“Our cash over cap has been high, and it’s continuing that way,” Eagles owner Jeff Lurie told the Philadelphia Inquirer this week. “I only know one way.”
York’s way is becoming apparent, too. The budget is the budget, and while it’s commensurate with the 49ers’ stature in the league, no exceptions will be made.
And that’s a shame because you get what you pay for in this league.