The San Francisco 49ers have a talented roster filled with players who they’re hoping will help them make it back to the postseason in 2025 and capture their first Super Bowl win since the 1994 season when they defeated the San Diego Chargers 49-26 in Super Bowl XXIX.

While San Francisco has all that talent, they remain $45.7 million under the salary cap, meaning they could spend much more to give themselves an even better chance of success this year and beyond.

The salary cap is a tool that helps bring parity to the league, as it keeps a handful of teams from spending a billion dollars and signing every big name and leaving others left without much hope of making a real run at a Lombardi Trophy themselves.

With this down time during the offseason, everyone is coming up with creative content ideas, and NFL.com editor Tom Blair recently took on the task of building the best roster that money can buy under the 2025 NFL salary cap.

For this exercise, Blair went through the NFL rosters and used players’ current contracts to attempt to build a team with the best chance of winning a Super Bowl while staying under the $279.2 million salary cap for the 2025.

Interestingly, Blair chose two 49ers for his team – offensive guard Dominick Puni and linebacker Fred Warner.

Puni is a great value pick as a starting guard making $1.7 million in the second year of his rookie deal. Blair pointed out that last seasons he had the sixth-best Pro Football Focus grade among all guards. As a rookie, that’s pretty impressive and gives the 25-year-old a strong starting point for 2025.

Warner, on the other hand, is simply the best inside linebacker in the league, and a $16.06 million cap hit isn’t keeping anyone away.

“The recently extended Fred Warner brings the kind of defensive dominance that — sure, I’ll say it — you can’t put a price on,” Blair wrote. “Plus, the realities of the linebacker market mean I can still slot in another do-it-all monster alongside Warner without having to spend much…”

At 28 years old, Warner has already racked up four Pro Bowl and All-Pro selections, including selections in each of the last three years. As long as he’s healthy in 2025, he should find himself in the same conversation again at the end of the year.

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