Nick WagonerOct 2, 2025, 06:00 AM ETCloseNick Wagoner is an NFL reporter at ESPN. Nick has covered the San Francisco 49ers since 2016, having previously covered the St. Louis Rams for 12 years, including three years (2013 to 2015) at ESPN. In over a decade with the company, Nick has led ESPN’s coverage of the Niners’ 2019 and 2023 Super Bowl run, Colin Kaepernick’s protest, the Rams making Michael Sam the first openly gay player drafted to the NFL, Sam’s subsequent pursuit of a roster spot and the team’s relocation and stadium saga.Follow on X
49ers rule Purdy, Pearsall, Jennings out vs. Rams (0:27)Adam Schefter reports on Brock Purdy, Ricky Pearsall and Jauan Jennings being out for the 49ers, and Mac Jones getting the start at quarterback vs. the Rams. (0:27)
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).
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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
“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 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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.