SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Quarterback Brock Purdy was in the middle of an early March workout at tight end George Kittle’s Nashville, Tennessee, gym when the news landed: The San Francisco 49ers had made a big splash in free agency, signing star receiver Mike Evans to a three-year contract.
As Purdy absorbed the information and looked around, he noted the signed Evans jersey hanging on Kittle’s wall. He credited Kittle for his recruiting efforts in bringing Evans, a potential future Hall of Famer, to San Francisco.
“I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” Purdy said. “What he’s done in his career, the thousand yards for a season thing, just the quarterbacks that he’s played with, for me to be able to now throw to him, it’s an honor.”
A depleted receiver room desperately needed Evans, whose streak of 11 consecutive 1,000-yard receiving seasons ended last year. But this addition carried more than on-field production.
It was a sign the Niners are back into win-now mode one year after undergoing a roster reset. An unexpected 12-5 season (after missing the playoffs in 2024) might have rekindled the want to make another championship push with an aging but star-laden core. Still, the difficulty of the NFC West division and a lack of proven young stars ready to form the team’s next nucleus leave plenty of questions as San Francisco enters training camp.
There are reasons for the Niners to be optimistic. In addition to Evans, the team signed veteran wideout Christian Kirk, traded for defensive tackle Osa Odighizuwa and reunited with linebacker Dre Greenlaw. They also spent many of their picks on more experienced rookies with an average age of more than 23 years old.
None of it feels like a coincidence for a team that went from having little idea how last season would play out to nearly claiming the NFC’s No. 1 seed in Week 18 and winning a road playoff game 23-19 in Philadelphia.
“It says that this group is ready to win, that’s what it does,” Niners tackle Colton McKivitz said. “We didn’t know last year what this team was going to do. There wasn’t a whole lot of playoff talk, Super Bowl talk, whatever it was. It was just, are you going to get better each week and win each week? When that’s eventually what we got, that was a reward for that 12-win season ... I think we’re ahead of the curve.”
THE NINERS FINISHED the 2024 season 6-11, and it left such a sour taste in the mouth of star tackle Trent Williams that it gave him pause when assessing his future.
Williams has long maintained that he’d like to play until he’s 40, but that season went south so quickly that Williams wondered whether he would spend his final NFL seasons on a contender.
“That season was, excuse my language, a s--- show,” Williams said.
The one-season drop from a Super Bowl appearance to the bottom of the NFC West forced the Niners to take a long look at what they could squeeze from their remaining franchise pillars. As part of that calculus, coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch already understood they’d have to part ways with a significant number of key veterans who had been integral to San Francisco’s success.
The 49ers said goodbye to 18 players, including nine who signed multiyear deals elsewhere. Those players signed deals that annually averaged $9.98 million with $161.16 million guaranteed at signing.
Their remaining resources went to signing stars Purdy, Kittle and linebacker Fred Warner to top-of-market extensions. They added 22 players, but only backup tight end Luke Farrell inked a deal for more than two years, and the average salary for those pickups was just $2.41 million with $32.72 million guaranteed at signing.
San Francisco used all 11 of its picks in the 2025 NFL draft with 10 earning roster spots last season. The goal, according to Lynch, was to infuse the roster with some much-needed youth.
“Last year was definitely different,” Kittle said. “We had a lot of, I felt like, randomness to it.”
It prompted Shanahan to host a dinner at his home for the remaining veterans where he emphasized the importance of helping the team’s younger players while focusing less on results and more on incremental improvement.
It was the first time in years that Shanahan shut down his team openly discussing its Super Bowl aspirations. Nobody really knew what the roster reset would yield.
“I don’t think there was a lot of hope for us last year, that’s for sure,” McKivitz said. “But I think we rehashed everything, reset our goals as a team, what our roles were, who we were as a team. ... We were playing with house money.”
The Niners heard Shanahan’s revamped messaging loud and clear. Regardless of myriad injuries to the likes of Purdy, Kittle, Warner and end Nick Bosa, the 49ers took advantage of a last-place schedule. Then they beat the defending Super Bowl champion Eagles on the road in an NFC wild-card game.
Despite that success, the warts were evident. Injuries were again a problem, and the dominant Niners of previous years cleared space for a scrappy bunch that finished 6-1 in one-score games. In the final three meetings with the Seattle Seahawks and Los Angeles Rams, the Niners received sobering reminders of how far they have to go, losing those contests by a combined 61 points.
The last of those was a 41-6 loss to Seattle in an NFC divisional round game.
“We knew last year was going to be a challenge going into it,” Shanahan said. “I can’t say that at the beginning of the year, I was sitting there thinking right away that we would have the record that we did. I think we won some close games, but we knew it was going to be a grind throughout the year to get the team to where we wanted to get to. I was real proud of our record but we’ve still got a ways to go, as you can see how we ended.”
ALTHOUGH THE END of the season came in resounding fashion, the 49ers had enough proof of concept from 2025’s reset to go back to making offseason additions capable of helping them win right away.
San Francisco allowed 12 free agents to depart but only receiver Jauan Jennings was a key member. Those dozen players signed deals with an annual average salary of $2.842 million with $22.98 million guaranteed at signing. None signed a deal longer than two years as even Jennings didn’t garner more than a one-year deal from the Minnesota Vikings.
San Francisco, with only Williams in need of a big-money extension among their crop of stars, eagerly dived back into the free agent market after a one-year hiatus. In the opening moments of the early negotiating window, they pulled Evans away from Tampa Bay.
Evans reportedly accepted less money so he could start fresh in San Francisco as the team’s new No. 1 wideout.
All told, the 49ers added 14 players in free agency along with Odighizuwa, who brings the highest potential price tag with base salaries of $20 million in 2027 and 2028. Most of those pickups come with some question marks, primarily when it comes to age and health. But the Niners prioritized players hungry to reach the NFL’s mountaintop.
“They’re guys that want to compete,” owner Jed York said. “They’re here for the right reasons. That’s always one of the things in free agency; you don’t know what you’re always going to get. And when you look at those guys who could have potentially gone other places for more money, they wanted to be here, they wanted to be in this system, they wanted to be with this team, and they want to compete for a Super Bowl.”
After signing a two-year, $50 million extension that guarantees $48.5 million, Williams said the return to the postseason in 2025 was “really important” in how he viewed his future in the league and with the team, noting that it “reignites that feeling that you had when we were going to NFC Championship Games.”
It’s a sentiment shared by many of Williams’ veteran teammates who appreciated that something far more familiar replaced the “randomness” of the 2025 offseason.
“When you see the guys on our roster, you see them around the building, it feels competitive in the best ways,” running back Christian McCaffrey said. “It feels like home.”
THE NINERS HOPE their offseason shopping will help them contend again. However, the reality remains that for them to get over the hump, they’ll need many young players to take a big step forward.
The Seahawks and Rams aren’t going away anytime soon, a message driven home by the Rams’ trade for star pass rusher Myles Garrett. Unlike those divisional rivals, the 49ers don’t have a lot of established, young star power they’ll be able to lean on well into the future.
Purdy is the centerpiece and plays the most important position but aside from him, only cornerback Deommodore Lenoir is firmly among the team’s best players and will be younger than 29 by the end of the season.
Even as Shanahan acknowledges that the team is waiting for some of its youth to develop into foundational cornerstones, he and Lynch believe there are players in-house capable of making that leap. To that end, San Francisco invested its draft picks in older, more established prospects such as second-round wideout De’Zhaun Stribling (23) and third-round edge rusher Romello Height (25) in hopes their learning curves will be less steep.
The 49ers enter training camp with the most available cap space of any team in the league. OverTheCap.com has them with over $71 million available after restructuring some deals, including Odighizuwa’s. It’s money they’ll likely roll into next year’s salary cap but it’s also available should the opportunity to make another bold roster move or two arise.
As the clock ticks on the Niners’ long-established pillars, not just wins and losses but how they obtain them will prove whether last season was a return to the competitive norm or a one-off for a team in transition.
“I would hope that we don’t have to [again] show how resilient we are,” Williams said. “I hope that we can show how dominant we are and how dominant we can be and how dominant we should be. With the offseason we’ve had, the players we’ve added, I think we got a good chance to go out there and show that.”
This offseason, Shanahan didn’t need any urgent meetings at his home. He hosted most of the starters, but the message was more about maintaining a standard than it was about the changing dynamics of the team.
“You tend to get obsessed with [results], especially with how close we’ve been,” Shanahan said. “I don’t think that was the healthiest thing for our team. I didn’t think it was last year. I think I kind of got my point across on that ... but we had some success. And now it starts over.”
