Some of the best moves are the ones you never make.
Take the case of the 49ers and defensive end Joey Bosa. It’s unclear just how high the 49ers were willing to go to bring in Nick Bosa’s brother as a bookend pass rusher, but it fell short of the one year, $12.6 million the Buffalo Bills offered to close the deal.
Buffalo came in from the cold, literally, with Bosa expected to wind up in the more sunny environs of the Bay Area or South Florida and the Miami Dolphins.
It’s a lesson many in the media never learn. Forget about playing with relatives, close to home or capitalizing on some sort of sentimental story on changing locations. Ninety-nine times out of 100, a player is going to follow the money.
If Joey Bosa continues to battle injuries and plays half a schedule in 2025, getting out-bid by Buffalo will be looked upon as a gift.
And while there is angst amongst the fan base as the 49ers attempt to formulate a depth chart along the defensive front, it’s a wasted exercise. It’s one of those “if the season ended today” arguments. Since the season is not ending today, it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter what the depth chart looks like in March because the 49ers are months away from having to field a team.
Something tells me the 49ers will have bodies to fill that depth chart, and it’s conceivable those bodies will be younger and at least as good as the departed players who contributed to a 6-11 season.
Do the 49ers even have a plan? Sure they do, and the process started more than a year ago as they prepared for the 2024 draft.
The 49ers took Ricky Pearsall Jr., a head-scratcher of a choice late in the first round considering they already had Brandon Aiyuk and Deebo Samuel. They did this with Aiyuk at the beginning of a hold-in distraction and Samuel the subject of trade talks. General manager John Lynch and coach Kyle Shanahan surely discussed they’d be without one of those players in 2025.
With Charvarius Ward entering the final year of his contract and the 49ers becoming more enamored with Deommodore Lenoir as a foundation piece in the secondary, they took Renardo Green in the second round. Green steps in for Ward, who signed with the Indianapolis Colts.
Left guard Aaron Banks was entering the final year of his contract, and the 49ers drafted Dominick Puni in the third round. They knew Banks would be out of their price range. Banks got a four-year, $77 million deal from Green Bay that is hard to fathom based on the way he played last season, although a groin injury and a concussion played a role.
All Puni did was become the rock of the offensive line, missing just one snap in 17 games.
Free safety Talanoa Hufanga was two years removed from being an All-Pro, and has since had a torn ACL, knee and wrist issues. In the fourth round, the 49ers took Malik Mustapha. Mustapha looked the part of a 10-year starter while Hufanga went to Denver for a contract as out-of-proportion as the one Banks received — three years and $45 million.
As much as Dre Greenlaw meant to the defense, it would be difficult in a business sense to commit three years and a maximum of $35 million, as Denver did, to a player who still has the heart to be a great player but might not have the body make it happen again.
The loss of players is startling in totality, but certainly not out of line with what has been speculated by pretty much every member of the media core that covers the team.
If anything, give the 49ers some credit for making such a dramatic recalibration after going 6-11. It would have been easy to shrug off the season to bad luck with injuries, a Super Bowl hangover and the holdouts by Aiyuk and Trent Williams that kept a dark cloud over the franchise.
Instead, Lynch and Shanahan, with some prodding (and insistence) from CEO Jed York, have embarked on a dramatic makeover. They’ll move on with quarterback Brock Purdy, tight end George Kittle, wide receiver Jauan Jennings, middle linebacker Fred Warner and Lenoir. They’ll roll the dice that Christian McCaffrey and Williams can be a reasonable facsimile of what they were in 2023.
Along with last year’s rookie class, that’s a pretty good core of players to build around.
There are two new coordinators in Robert Saleh on defense and Brant Boyer on special teams.
This was not a “let’s run it back and see what happens” scenario as much as a “heads will roll” reaction to a startlingly bad 2-7 faceplant to end the season.
The 49ers will continue to add players who won’t excite the fan base, but NFL free agency is a rummage sale. The Minnesota Vikings are being celebrated for adding Jonathan Allen and former 49er Javon Hargrave at defensive tackle. Both were asked to leave by their former employers. The Washington Commanders signed Javon Kinlaw, another ex-49er, to an astounding contract that could pay him as much as $45 million.
Very few teams part with players they truly want to keep, yet it’s as if the label of free agency makes the newly released somehow more desirable. Bad teams often make the mistake of spending big money just because it’s in their pocket.
That doesn’t mean the 49ers are geniuses for the way they’re operating, but it may not end up as bad as you think. They’ll be better than 6-11 and maybe even challenge the Los Angeles Rams for supremacy in the NFC West.
Or you can just beat the rush and give up on them now after they parted with a handful of players who at one time contributed mightily to their success but of late had been dragging down both their finances and performance.
It’s worth waiting to see how it plays out.