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Four bold 49ers offseason thoughts, starting with …
1. The 49ers are acting with the conviction of a team that has already won a Super Bowl in this era, though the winning part hasn’t quite happened. Yet.
You eventually have to win a Super Bowl to justify an attitude of perpetual confidence, but it’s also a pretty good way to keep the machine purring for as long as possible.
What else could you conclude after everything that’s happened over the last few months, crystallized by Kyle Shanahan, John Lynch, and Jed York’s separate but similarly assured media sessions from the owners’ meetings in Arizona on Sunday and Monday?
They’re poised. They’re confident. They’ve established a way of doing things over the previous nine seasons, they’ve shown that it mostly works, and they’re not too interested in revamping much for Season 10.
Really, the 49ers’ leaders are behaving with the security and serenity of a group that has no doubts about winning big for quite some time in the future.
Let’s note that secure leaders usually are the best ones. No big course changes. No panic. It’s just rare for a regime to feel this assured this deep into its tenure without owning a set of Super Bowl rings.
Lynch and Shanahan had the gumption to go through a major financial and roster reset a year ago — on the heels of a disastrous 6-11 season in 2024 — took massive injury hits through 2025 and still went 12-5 and won a big playoff game in Philadelphia before it all caved in against the eventual-champion Seahawks a week later.
They didn’t follow that up with frantic spending in free agency or other roster upheaval to try to clear those last hurdles. They didn’t rush to redo Trent Williams’ contract just to keep things calm. They added at targeted spots — signing Mike Evans to be their new lead wide receiver and trading for defensive tackle Osa Odighizuwa — but nothing crazy.
“Feel good about where our roster is — it was definitely a better offseason I think than the year prior,” Shanahan told reporters on Monday. “The year prior was tough just losing all those guys. We still lost a number of guys this year. But we also added ‘em. And we still have the draft ahead of us.
“But love where we’re at now. I love the moves that we’ve made.”
They’ve got momentum from last season, they’ve got Fred Warner, Nick Bosa, and George Kittle set to come back at different points this coming season, and they’ve got so much cap space that they can keep Williams at his highest number without paying guaranteed money to knock it down and can carry Brandon Aiyuk’s contract for as long as they want.
They haven’t traded valuable backup quarterback Mac Jones for anything that could possibly help them more. They even went back in time and added old favorite Dre Greenlaw, the truest act of a regime that loves what it’s built over the years.
2. The 49ers probably are out of the long-term/top-of-market contract game. At least for a while longer.
The last one of those huge contracts handed out by the 49ers? The Aiyuk deal before the 2024 season, which soured instantaneously and has had a major ripple effect on all future 49ers negotiations that probably will extend into the next decade.
So the 49ers didn’t go hard for Maxx Crosby, who likely would’ve needed a new deal. Or Trey Hendrickson or Alec Pierce as free agents. We’ll see what happens in the future if some other extremely valuable player comes up for bidding, but at this point, the 49ers clearly aren’t interested in going to the top of any positional market.
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Javon Hargrave in March 2023 was the 49ers’ last really big free-agent signing, and he might be the last one of this era. Since then, the 49ers have gone into deep draft-and-develop mode. Their biggest contracts have gone to their own players, most especially to Brock Purdy, who didn’t come close to resetting the quarterback market with his $53-million-a-year deal.
I’m sure Shanahan and Lynch will always be up to repeat the kind of splash trades they pulled for Williams (April 2020) and Christian McCaffrey (midseason 2022), and the ensuing large contracts to keep them. But for this cycle, it took the more moderate form of trading a third-round pick for Odighizuwa.
The 49ers traded for former Cowboys defensive lineman Osa Odighizuwa earlier this month. | Source: Scott Taetsch/Getty Images
3. The 49ers got nicked and jabbed with odd headlines and delays throughout the 2024 Aiyuk negotiation, so they don’t mind generating weird headlines and delays of their own on his way out.
How long can the 49ers keep Aiyuk on the roster even after Lynch and Shanahan have clearly indicated that they don’t consider him part of the team anymore?
For as long as they don’t mind getting asked about it.
And Jed York on Monday didn’t sound like he minded at all. In fact, he launched a whole new round of headlines when he left the door open for Aiyuk to return to the 49ers this year.
There’s a practical part of this — as York noted, they’ve paid Aiyuk a lot of money for almost zero return in 2024 and 2025. If they can get a seventh-round pick for him, instead of just releasing him, that’s at least something.
I also believe there’s some suspicion from the 49ers side that other teams or players influenced Aiyuk’s thinking during and after the 2024 negotiations. I don’t know if the suspicion is correct, but I’ve heard enough grumbling about it that I don’t doubt the 49ers have an attitude about this.
And if the 49ers believe that Aiyuk has had his eye on another team from all the way back then — everybody thinks it’s the Washington Commanders with his pal Jayden Daniels — then the 49ers don’t mind making Washington and Aiyuk wait. If Washington can’t wait, well, a draft pick might quicken up the 49ers’ decision-making process a bit.
Brandon Aiyuk remains on the 49ers’ roster even after he stopped showing up to the team facility last year. | Source: Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images
4. How much are the Rams laughing at the 49ers’ loud complaints about getting stuck in the Week 1 Australia game against … the Rams?
I get why Shanahan isn’t happy about landing the Melbourne trip — replacing the short flight to LA — in the same season the 49ers also have to travel to Mexico City. The 49ers aren’t the only team that’s sensitive about schedule issues, and any coach would be bothered by a season with the most travel miles in NFL history.
However, I think some teams talk themselves into bad moods and down periods by obsessing too much about the schedule, which won’t be changed no matter how much they complain.
So I love the half-joking theory from my podcast cohost Matt Barrows that the Rams pushed to play the 49ers in this game partly to screw up the 49ers through training camp (oh no, we’ve gotta prepare for this 16-hour flight to Melbourne!) and into the first month of the season (yikes, we’re so tired from that 15-hour flight home!).
It should also be noted that most teams wouldn’t give up a slated home game against a top divisional rival the way the Rams did. But we all know that SoFi Stadium isn’t much of a Rams home-field advantage when the 49ers come to town.
And the Rams — who beat the Jaguars in London last year as part of a six-game winning streak— are decidedly less than squeamish about these long trips.
As Lynch said this week, popular TV teams sometimes get loaded into uncomfortable schedules. The 49ers are a very popular TV team. Again: They can’t argue their way out of that one.
I’ll add that the 49ers haven’t been sent to Europe since 2013, landed the Super Bowl at Levi’s Stadium twice in the last decade, got an NFL loan to help construct the building, and refuse to do “Hard Knocks.”
It’s all part of the scheduling process. It’s all part of who gets leeway and who doesn’t.
And from what I can tell, the only other top TV team that has been protected from international travel more than the 49ers recently is the Cowboys, who will play their first international game since 2014 when they host a game in Brazil this season.
At some point, every team goes through this. If the Rams are tweaking the 49ers a little with this, it’s up to the 49ers to prove that the Rams aren’t on to something.