You can’t totally avoid big salary bets in sports. You can’t always be coldly logical. If you make a rational financial decision on every single personnel decision, you’ll probably end up as the most rational 7-10 team in the league every year.
And the 49ers were in the Super Bowl — ahead in the Super Bowl — less than 14 months ago. They had a talented roster that failed last year. They have a much less talented roster now than they did a few days ago.
Until and unless we hear otherwise from Shanahan or Lynch — or from their associates talking to the media — I’ll presume that both men are generally on board with this. Or at least most of this. Or maybe the 49ers’ money people placated Shanahan by signing 2021 draft darling Mac Jones on Wednesday? (I kid! Or do I?)
My working premise is that the 49ers went into this offseason with a strong commitment to cutting down their cash outlay this season and felt like they could do it and still keep most of their roster together. But then — again, this is just my theory, to try to make sense of this — something might’ve happened over the first few days of free agency that triggered this onslaught.
I’m not sure how else you can explain cutting Floyd before losing out on Joey Bosa. Or cutting Collins just to save his salary. (The 49ers took dead-cap hits on both players but saved cash. This is all about cash.) That Floyd and Collins (and Hargrave) were scooped up for big dollars almost immediately after they hit the waiver wire makes the 49ers’ decisions even more confusing. They were valuable players. The 49ers ate money rather than keep them on the roster. And after those cuts, the 49ers now have more than $86 million in dead money on this year’s cap, according to the Associated Press’ Josh Dubow, and have an additional $21.5 million in dead money on their 2026 cap. They’re saving money. They’re also drawing dead at several important positions.
If they’ve gone this far, could the 49ers just strip the payroll all the way down by subtracting Nick Bosa, Brandon Aiyuk, Williams, McCaffrey, and others? What’s the point of paying those guys if you might be headed toward a mediocre season, anyway?
I can’t answer those questions right now. In the very recent past, I could’ve easily answered that the 49ers are intent on keeping every good player. As Lynch said after the season when asked about Deebo, “We’re not in the business of letting good players out of here.” But Deebo was traded for a fifth-round pick a few weeks after that statement. They could trade Aiyuk at any point — less than a year after signing him to a $30 million-a-year deal. A bunch of others are gone, too.
The 49ers used to celebrate these kinds of players. They used to accept the going rate for accumulating them. And over a very dramatic few weeks, it’s all been flipped. Now the 49ers can’t get away quick enough from many of their better guys. I wonder how quickly they’re moving away from their better days, too.