In hindsight, there are always signs. Certainly, looking back, the San Francisco 49ers gave us plenty.
The continued turnover of key coaching staff spots, including the firings of defensive coordinator Nick Sorensen and special teams coordinator Brian Schneider in January. The surprise February departure of quarterbacks coach Brian Griese, who was a key figure in San Francisco’s selection of Brock Purdy in the 2022 draft and considered a rising head coaching candidate. There was the trading of wideout Deebo Samuel less than two weeks ago, and the pervasive buzz across the league that some inside the 49ers franchise regret the massive contract extension of receiver Brandon Aiyuk.
Even more than the last few offseasons for the 49ers, this one was getting messy fast. And then on the first day of free agency — bloody Monday in San Francisco — it went through a wall.
Gone via free agency or release are three defenders in their prime (linebacker Dre Greenlaw, safety Talanoa Hufanga, and cornerback Charvarius Ward), a solid offensive guard in Aaron Banks, a franchise Pro Bowl and All-Pro cornerstone (fullback Kyle Juszczyk) and a handful of others. In totality? Eleven players out the door who either were starters or provided depth. The other side of the ledger was hardly as beefy: the addition of solid tight end Luke Farrell and the retention of two rotational players in running back Patrick Taylor and defensive lineman Kevin Givens.
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On one hand, it looks like a mixed-rationale purge driven by money or age or injuries. On another, it’s the continuation of a franchise trajectory that feels like it’s in the midst of some kind of operational reset — recalibrating how the team spends money while standing in the doorway of a Brock Purdy extension that is shaping up to be a difficult negotiation. Things change. Sometimes in ways that you don’t always anticipate. It’s a reality that takes me back to a conversation I once had with 49ers general manager John Lynch about the difficulties of scaling a Super Bowl mountain but failing to plant a victory flag.
I asked, “That really becomes the 18th opponent of the season, right? Just holding it all together when you’re right there and had all that success and it’s only a matter of time before people come to chip away. You hope that it happens after you win a Super Bowl.”
“Exactly,” Lynch replied. “Exactly.”
Lynch knows this problem, where the surrounding league is always stalking the most talented franchises, waiting for a chance to strip its bones at the first opportunity. He saw it as a player with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Denver Broncos. And he’s learned the lesson more than once now while stewarding the 49ers from the GM’s desk. The only difference? Lynch’s latter position as an executive forces him to be a participant in the salary cap culling, rather than the victim of it as a player.
So maybe we should have seen this bloody Monday coming. Especially after the 49ers finished 6-11 and Lynch’s season-capping press conference had some warning signs sewn into it, after he was asked about San Francisco enduring turbulent offseasons.
“We have a lot of good players,” Lynch said. “One of the things that comes with a lot of good players is it’s hard to feed everyone. You’ve got to make tough decisions. We’re certainly at a point where we’ve had a five-year run with four NFC Championships, two Super Bowls. You have to go back to the fundamentals of really building the thing. The lifeblood of your organization needs to be strong drafts. Because it gives you young players that you have under contract for a [period]. We had multiple, I think seven players, that were starters off that [2024] draft class, whether we expect them to be, they did. They gained really valuable experience.”
When I hear the words now, it translates as: We’ve drafted young, cheap and contractually landlocked talent before. We can do it again.
And now they certainly will have to. Because while you can argue that San Francisco was simply moving on from less than perfect situations with some players, you can’t argue that it simply won’t hurt. Losing Greenlaw will hurt across the board. Hufanga, despite the injury concerns, has the talent to be one of the best safeties in the NFL. Ward, when playing at the top of his game, was a problem that opposing offenses had to solve during their practice preparation. Banks is a sturdy 27-year old player on the offensive line and teams are crawling over each other to get at those. Even Juszczyk, who is getting old and arguably more obsolete with each passing season, was the definition of a culture guy who was also still playing at an All-Pro level.
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There’s a reason why all of these players are coveted by other teams: because they’re the kind of building blocks you want to pay. The 49ers didn’t — and arguably couldn’t — keep that talent around as they move into an era of cost-effectiveness that aims to avoid another season like 2024, when ownership forked over $334 million in real cash only to watch the season crash and burn. That kind of thing can’t happen again. And Lynch said as much at the conclusion of the season, when he tasked himself and head coach Kyle Shanahan as being the tandem that would fix it.
“We still put ourselves in good position and we couldn’t get it done,” Lynch said. “We have to own that as a team. That’s why we’re 6-11. We have a high standard. We had high expectations. We fell short of that. It’s our job to fix that. I know that Kyle and I are committed as we’ve ever been to doing just that. We don’t plan on being in this place — don’t like it.”
What this means for the 49ers is what we’re seeing now. Roster losses that, while you could see them coming, were fast and deep. A Purdy negotiation could take the entire offseason and could have some roller coaster moments similar to the Aiyuk extension clash. And a general sense of foreboding that this might be a retooling that is just beginning — churning a widening portion of the roster with younger, cheaper players to a level that hasn’t really been seen since Lynch and Shanahan arrived in 2017. If you remember, that was a two-year renovation project that reset the path of the organization, but also came with some unexpected turns and calculated gambles.
Through all of that, one thing was clear: Ownership would aggressively spend as long as the results showed up in the standings. After a massively disappointing 2024, that may have changed. And on Monday, we saw how harsh this could get moving forward.
