What the heck are the 49ers doing? A hard look at the rival Rams may hold the answer

A week into free agency, the numbers are eye-popping. Other teams have spent $321 million in signing free agents away from the San Francisco 49ers. Meanwhile, general manager John Lynch and coach Kyle Shanahan’s team has awarded only $37 million in contracts to new players, making for a free agency spending deficit of $284 million — the largest in NFL history, and by a wide margin.

So, what the heck are the 49ers doing?

There’s actually a sound rationale to the team’s cost-cutting actions — and it’s rooted in the fact that they simply weren’t good in 2024.

Consider the specifics of the 49ers’ disastrous 6-11 performance, a flameout with the NFL’s oldest roster which came on the heels of a 12-5 season and overtime Super Bowl loss. Realities change fast in this league.

The 49ers couldn’t stop the run (they ranked No. 29 in expected points added per play against it). The 49ers couldn’t run effectively when opponents could figure a run might be coming (they ranked No. 20 in first-down run efficiency and No. 31 in rushing success rate on third- and fourth-and-short). The 49ers couldn’t create space in the passing game (their receivers ranked No. 32 — dead last — in average separation at the time of catch or incompletion). And the 49ers couldn’t consistently execute on special teams (they also ranked dead last in efficiency here).

The performance profile over those four fundamental metrics was so putrid that Lynch not-so-subtly shared the team’s plans to overhaul much of the roster at last month’s NFL Scouting Combine.

“We need to get younger,” Lynch said. “Our [2024 draft class] was a great move towards that. We’ll have four picks in the top 100 [in 2025]. … We’re excited about adding more youth to a great core of players that we already have.”

Toss the age impetus out for a second, since pursuing youth is a ubiquitous NFL goal. Let’s analyze Lynch’s words from a merit-based lens: There was no way the 49ers could, in good faith, look at the horrific performance splits above and conclude that keeping the entire band together would be a fruitful strategy moving forward.

Clearly, on-field shortcomings sparked much of the recent exodus, particularly among the defensive line. Last week, the team released veterans Javon Hargrave, Maliek Collins, and Leonard Floyd, all of whom had been acquired as veterans to help the team’s mad dash to cram in another Super Bowl run. Though this trio saw pass-rushing success, all three graded poorly against the run in 2024, comprising a key part of that 29th-ranked run defense.

The 49ers considered this significant structural damage that they needed to fix. Construction is as a good metaphor for the team’s offseason process.

Lynch and Shanahan built a beautiful mansion over the years. They boasted what was arguably the NFL’s best roster in 2022, 2023, and possibly even entering 2024. But the foundation of that house, even though it still features several striking fixtures, has been eroding beneath the surface. The NFL cycle, which inflicts wear and tear on everyone, has not spared the 49ers.

The time to renovate has come.

The 49ers face a tall task, but they do have a convenient blueprint to follow.

It comes straight from their NFC West rivals, the Los Angeles Rams, who were in a strikingly similar boat not too long ago. The Rams followed a 12-5 season and a run to the Super Bowl (although the Rams actually won the big game) with a disastrous 5-12 campaign in 2022.

In the offseason that followed, Lynch’s L.A. counterpart — Rams general manager Les Snead — sounded a lot like the 49ers’ GM does now.

“From the macro standpoint, there is going to be an element where we’re probably going to have to … not press the gas as much,” Snead said. “Pay a little bit of the debt that we’ve accumulated.”

In a letter sent to season ticket holders at the time, Rams president Kevin Demoff wrote that the franchise had “taken all of [its] salary-cap pain in 2023” after realizing that the previous stretch of ultra-assertive moves had buried L.A. in a disadvantageous position.

“During the trade deadline this past year,” Demoff wrote, “it was clear that in a new era where teams were willing to be as aggressive as we were, that we had neither the draft capital nor the salary-cap space to win trade conversations and be able to take on top players at the salaries they would command.”

The 2023 Rams, like the current 49ers, didn’t make any big splashes in that year’s free agency. Their most notable signing might’ve been receiver Demarcus Robinson, whom the 49ers — perhaps not coincidentally — just inked to a modest deal last week.

L.A. instead relied on budget-friendly additions and on a massive 14-player draft class — which is cost-controlled by the rookie wage scale — to replenish the ranks. The Rams entered training camp with a staggering 36 rookies on their 90-man roster. Lynch’s team won’t match that number, but don’t be surprised if the 49ers approach it: They have 11 picks in the upcoming 2025 draft, the most of any NFL team, and 31 roster spots still left to fill.

It’s worth noting that the Rams were in definite salary-cap hell to begin 2023, a position that required them to generally avoid bigger expenditures and even jettison players just to fit under the limit. The current 49ers aren’t in that cramped of a position when it comes to the cap, but Lynch did make it clear that the team — No. 2 in cash spending among NFL teams since 2017 — would tighten its belt this offseason. (Since unused cap space carries over from season to season, doing so should help the 49ers reach a better future position by the time QB Brock Purdy’s presumed mega deal kicks in and headlines a whole slew of escalating costs.)

Finally, the primary buzz line from Lynch’s press conference at the 2025 Combine, “no guarantees”, was strikingly similar to what Snead said about parting ways with Rams players when he first met with the media following that 2022 season.

“All things are in play,” Snead said.

He wasn’t kidding. L.A. gutted much of its roster, cutting or trading away several prominent players:

Two years later, Lynch isn’t horsing around, either. The 49ers’ list of departures, either through release or free agency, is similarly long and even features one crossover name — Floyd:

Snead insisted on calling L.A.’s process a “remodel” and not a “rebuild”, since the latter term is associated with the complete disposal of a team’s talent. The Rams, like the current 49ers, were adamant about keeping core players Snead described as “weight-bearing walls.” Those foundational pillars were quarterback Matthew Stafford, defensive tackle Aaron Donald, and receiver Cooper Kupp (whom, in another illustration of how quickly life moves in the NFL, the Rams cut last week — just two years later).

Immediate success validated Snead’s choice of verbiage.

The Rams, after starting the 2023 season 3-6, won seven of their final eight games to finish 10-7 and make the playoffs. The remodel took another positive step in 2024, when Snead added a 10-player draft class ahead of a season that saw another 10-7 finish, an NFC West title, a dominant wild-card win over the Minnesota Vikings, and a narrow playoff loss to the eventual Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles.

So, what lessons can the 49ers — who’d obviously like similarly positive results — take from the Rams as far as what comes next?

To begin, the 49ers already drafted well in 2024, which should give them a head start in this retooling effort. They desperately needed that after the 2022 and 2023 drafts didn’t yield any certain long-term fixtures outside of Purdy, who was the very final pick in 2022.

The importance of drafting well to the defensive line tops the to-do list for 2025, in large part because the 49ers are especially thin there right now but also because the Rams have done that so masterfully over the past two years.

Additions through the draft to the line are highlighted in the “Acquisition Method” columns below. Compared to the 49ers, look how many recent draftees L.A. successfully crammed onto its 2024 front:

A key variable as the 49ers try to change the composition above: 2025 boasts one of the best rookie D-line classes in recent memory. It’s particularly strong at defensive tackle, where 41 players attended the Combine after only 25 were invited the year prior.

Of course, relying on rookies is fraught with risk. The 49ers haven’t drafted an ultra-productive defensive lineman since selecting Nick Bosa in 2019.

But they’ve also stopped aggressively swinging at the position. In fact, the 49ers’ last D-line pick before Day 3 of the draft came way back in 2022, when they selected Drake Jackson in the second round.

It’d be downright shocking if that strategy didn’t change here in 2025, and the positive developmental trajectory of L.A.’s defense might buoy the 49ers’ confidence in their own process. The Rams, who ranked dead last in cash spent on their rookie-laden defense last season, were willing to suffer through the expected growing pains: They ranked No. 29 in EPA on that side of the ball through the first three months of the season.

But over the final month of the regular season and the playoffs, the Rams defense — anchored by its young line — blossomed in real-time. L.A. ranked No. 5 over that finishing stretch.

The 49ers, with Purdy at the helm and plenty still invested in their offense, can hope the attack can respectably hold down the fort in case their defense undergoes a similar trial by fire and the associated struggles during its youth movement.

The 49ers aren’t the only team openly trending toward the Rams’ formula.

“If you add a veteran at this point, he could just be standing in the way,” Jacksonville Jaguars GM James Gladstone said last week. “We’re going to allow these rookies to get a chance to get out on the field and help us this coming fall.”

And therein lies perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the model that the 49ers seem to be adopting.

The Rams saw all 14 of their drafted rookies in 2023 make the initial 53-man roster, which tied an NFL record. At the next season’s cutdown, 19 of the 24 Rams’ rookies drafted over 2023 and 2024 made the initial 2024 53-man roster. That’s a rookie success rate of nearly 80 percent — virtually unheard of on a winning NFL team.

In order to attain that, the Rams had to put Gladstone’s words into practice. Like this year’s Jaguars, they ensured that placeholder veterans — those without long-term futures in the organization — wouldn’t be standing in the way during those rookies’ formative months in the league.

L.A. was willing to lower its short-term floor so that it could raise its long-term ceiling. In a young man’s league, the fresh upside of drafted talent — even if it needed some time to develop — was king.

The 49ers — a team that’s released three veteran D-linemen and passed on re-signing other defenders without immediately signing obvious replacements at many of the vacated spots — appear to be adhering to the same principle.