SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The San Francisco 49ers began laying the path to quarterback Brock Purdy becoming the highest-paid player in franchise history roughly four years before it happened.
In the 2021 offseason, the Niners decided quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo was not in their long-term plans — just three years after they made him the league’s highest paid player ($27.5 million per year).
General manager John Lynch told ESPN last week that he and coach Kyle Shanahan combed through three-year projections from executive vice president of football operations Paraag Marathe, assistant general manager Brian Hampton and their staffs, showing them that the quarterback market was about to explode.
The 49ers also had multiple star players heading toward position-defining contracts, which, combined with Garoppolo’s injury history and limitations made the choice academic, according to Lynch.
It was time to move on to someone younger and cheaper.
“We felt like if we got a quarterback on a rookie deal, we could put together a team that would be really hard to deal with,” Lynch said. “When you have that, it’s a lot easier to have a lot more stars across the rest of your roster. Not just stars, but high-end depth, which we’ve had for a long time.”
In today’s NFL, top-end quarterback contracts have become onerous enough that teams, like the 49ers, must begin planning years in advance for those cap-eating deals. It often requires a roster reset that includes sacrificing good players, a willingness to eat dead money to remove players who might not be producing equal to their deal and focusing on earning compensatory draft picks to have more shots at drafting talented, cost-controlled players to replace those who move on.
After Shanahan and Lynch decided to move on from Garoppolo, they drafted Trey Lance. The hope was Lance would develop into one of the highest-paid quarterbacks in the league.
While it didn’t quite pan out that way, the 49ers’ financial reckoning at quarterback still arrived this offseason in the form of Purdy, who signed a five-year, $265 million deal in April that includes $181 million in guarantees.
What resulted was one of the most dramatic roster resets in NFL history. The Niners said goodbye to nearly 20 players, 15 of whom landed deals elsewhere worth up to a maximum of $341.5 million.
To replace those departed contributors, the 49ers focused on the 2025 NFL draft and rebuilding their defense. It was a roster reimagining following a similar blueprint of the 2023 Los Angeles Rams and 2024 Buffalo Bills, both teams that Lynch says his staff spent time studying before the offseason began.
Those Rams traded cornerback Jalen Ramsey and receiver Allen Robinson, let linebacker Bobby Wagner, defensive end Leonard Floyd, nose tackle Greg Gaines and other starters go and then used 14 draft picks to replenish the defense. After a 3-6 start, those young Rams emerged in the second half, going 7-1 on the way to making the playoffs.
The 2025 Niners (3-1) expect to endure similar bumps after resetting on the fly but remain competitive enough to contend for playoff spots while their young players develop. They’ll put that to the test Thursday (8:15 p.m. ET, Prime Video) against the Rams (3-1) at SoFi Stadium.
“When you find somebody that is a top-10 quarterback who can help you continually win football games, then you have to make that decision,” 49ers owner Jed York said earlier this year. “And if you do that, it just comes with consequences, and you have to figure it out.”
Avoiding the “QB abyss”
As one of the longest-tenured general managers in the NFL, Les Snead has worked through nearly every kind of quarterback scenario for the Rams since 2012. He traded two quarterbacks taken No. 1 (Sam Bradford and Jared Goff), traded up to No. 1 to select one (Goff) and dealt for a proven veteran star in Matthew Stafford.
Snead knows what it’s like to have the franchise quarterback, what it’s like to be without one and how either scenario shapes the roster.
And though Snead has also overseen a roster reset that has yielded mostly good results, he wants it to be known that having a long-term plan at quarterback is better than the alternative.
“It is so awesome to be able to go to sleep, wake up and know that your QB, whether rookie contract or veteran, has proven he can help you win,” Snead said. “Anytime you go into the QB abyss, you jump in the deep end of the pool, and you can’t see the shore. You’re just swimming and hoping.”
For the Niners, the signs that Purdy would be the guy who helps Lynch and Shanahan sleep better revealed themselves early. Shanahan pointed to Purdy’s second NFL start, a December 2022 game in Seattle in which Purdy played through a rib injury on short rest to help clinch the NFC West, as the night he knew Purdy had what it takes to succeed.
Purdy further proved that in 2023 when he overcame a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right (throwing) elbow to lead the Niners to the Super Bowl, earn his first Pro Bowl nod and finish fourth in league MVP voting as he threw for a franchise-record 4,280 yards.
According to York, the decision to sign Purdy long-term was solidified about halfway through this past season with Lynch circling back to Shanahan once the 6-11 season concluded to ensure that was still the plan.
“You don’t burden your head coach until the season’s over and you say, ‘Hey, now comes the real big decision. Are we going for this? Is Brock our guy?'” Lynch said. “And understanding that with that, we’re not going to be able to keep the rest of our guys. That’s just the reality in our league.”
The three-year window
The Niners began financially preparing to pay their franchise quarterback as far back as 2022, according to Lynch. Since Shanahan and Lynch arrived in 2017, they’ve worked closely with Marathe and Hampton to plan for the future in three-year windows.
Marathe, Hampton and their staffs regularly work on future projections, including the anticipated rise of the salary cap and what the cost of top players at each position might be. It helps the 49ers budget for forthcoming contracts and determine how that player might fit.
Built into those conversations is the idea that there’s a difference between what Shanahan calls the “A” players and those who might not quite reach that level. Performance, injury, other players already on the roster or some combination of the three factor into those discussions.
Some choices are easy and it played out in real time this offseason when the Niners re-signed tight end George Kittle and linebacker Fred Warner, perhaps the two defining players of this era of 49ers football.
“We go to lengths to define who we are as a team, who we want to be, and those guys check every box in terms of our mission statement on who we want to be as the Niners” Lynch said. “Where do you draw the line? That’s where it gets a little tougher.”
The result of those projections came during March’s mass exodus when the Niners said goodbye to players such as receiver Deebo Samuel, guard Aaron Banks, running back Jordan Mason, linebacker Dre Greenlaw, cornerback Charvarius Ward and safety Talanoa Hufanga, all of whom had played at or near a Pro Bowl level at some point with the Niners. They also released established veteran defensive tackles Javon Hargrave and Maliek Collins and end Leonard Floyd.
All of them signed the type of middle or upper middle class deals that no longer fit the Niners modus operandi, a tacit admission that they still have good football left in them.
“We broke the NFL record for the most money in the NFL leaving our building and signing with other teams,” Shanahan said. “It shows you how good the players who left our building [were]. They weren’t just old guys that it was time to move on from. They were dudes who could really help other teams win. When you do that, that’s not the most fun thing for a coach.”
Cleaning up the cap
After the 49ers’ loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LVIII, Lynch, Shanahan and the team’s other top executives sat down to plan for 2024, but the conversations that happened after that defeat took on a decidedly different tone than after previous deep postseason runs.
According to Lynch and Shanahan, the Niners considered getting ahead of the forthcoming roster shake-up immediately after the Super Bowl defeat. “There were a lot of internal conversations,” Lynch said. “But we felt like our team was so primed and ready and you have to take a hard look at things.”
The Niners opted for one last stand with their core group but with an eye toward the future. It didn’t work. Their season fell apart quickly and, even as 2024 unfolded, Lynch and Shanahan knew exactly how painful the 2025 offseason was going to be.
“But even then, you can’t prep for it until you’ve been through it,” Lynch said. “There were times that you’d go home in a foul mood because of it, but you knew that it was something we had to do.”
That pain would come not just from losing key players but in eating the dead salary cap space that many of them still carried. Releasing or trading players with remaining guarantees or a prorated signing bonus on their deals results in all that money accelerating to the cap immediately.
Much like the 2023 Rams, the Niners had to be willing to absorb that dead money and once they got started, they decided to eat as much of it as possible in one fell swoop to clean up the cap for 2026 and beyond.
As of this week, the 49ers have a league-leading $99.2 million in dead money and still rank third in cash spending ($328.1 million) because of the deals for Purdy, Kittle and Warner. The dead cap is even more than the Rams ate in 2023 when they dropped to last in the NFL in cash spending ($185.9 million) while eating nearly $80 million in dead money.
That offseason, Rams president Kevin Demoff sent a letter to season-ticket holders asking for patience as they cleaned up their books for what Snead referred to as a “remodel” rather than a rebuild.
One method for offsetting all of their losses in personnel and cap space? Compensatory draft picks. That isn’t complicated but it does require patience and makes for plenty of handwringing when free agency starts and players leave without replacements coming in.
It’s no coincidence that the Rams and Niners both rank among the top six all time in compensatory selections and nobody has garnered more than the Niners’ 14 comp picks over the past three years. Over the Cap projects San Francisco to get the maximum four more comp picks through the formula in 2026, too.
As Snead is quick to point out, even when the Rams were making big trades for star players such as Ramsey and Von Miller, they were still making plenty of selections to restock the roster.
“Even in that whole ‘F them picks era,’ we probably had the third most draft picks of anyone,” Snead said. “People said we were top heavy but when you’re top heavy, you’ve really got to rely on those right players on their rookie contract to play key roles.”
“Is it worth doing all this?”
Like Snead and the Rams, Shanahan and Lynch avoid using the word rebuild. There are too many star players on the roster with what Lynch calls “pelts on the wall” to blow it up and concede.
It’s why Shanahan gathered veterans such as Kittle, running back Christian McCaffrey, left tackle Trent Williams, Warner, defensive end Nick Bosa and fullback Kyle Juszczyk at his house for an offseason dinner. He wanted not only to share the plan, but for them to take ownership in helping that wave of youth learn.
“The cool thing about this is we still have a bunch of those other players that we didn’t have when we started this,” Shanahan said. “But we do have to develop these guys and make them turn into the types of guys who just went other places.”
In one more way, the Niners followed the Rams blueprint: most of their offseason was centered on rebuilding the defense, especially upfront, while maintaining continuity on offense.
In 2023, the Rams spent two of their first three picks on pass rushers Byron Young and Kobie Turner. They followed in 2024 by using their first two picks on linemen Jared Verse and Braden Fiske. Snead says that was by design because the Rams value the defensive line.
Like the Rams, the Niners also put a premium on the defensive line with Lynch often citing advice that former Colts, Browns and Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi once gave to John Elway about focusing on getting a quarterback and guys who knock the quarterback down.
That, combined with the rising costs of defensive linemen, left the Niners to spend three of their first five picks on end Mykel Williams and tackles Alfred Collins and CJ West. All of their first five selections were defenders.
When the 49ers opened the season on Sept. 7, they had eight new starters from 2024’s opening night. Coordinator Robert Saleh, whom Kittle calls the team’s biggest offseason addition, wasn’t sure what to expect in the opening weeks from his revamped defense.
Through four weeks, the 49ers’ offseason roster reset has yielded a 3-1 record, albeit with plenty of visible warts. In many ways, that, too, was something the Niners saw coming.
For this season to be a success, much will depend on whether the remaining stars can be healthy and produce until/if those young players ascend. Much of that also falls into the lap of the quarterback the Niners planned to pay long before they even had him on the roster: Purdy.
“You’ve got to ask yourself, is this quarterback worth doing all this?” Lynch said. “And in our case, it’s not a burden because you have your franchise quarterback and we all know how important that is to your team.”
