Kawakami: Looming and loaded 49ers questions for Kyle Shanahan, John Lynch, and Jed York

If you think that this frugal 49ers’ offseason seems like it’s been run by financial algorithms and corporate efficiency consultants, you aren’t alone. It does feel that way — cold, calculating, and full of terminations.

More about Jed York’s cash flow than his football team’s potential place in the NFC West standings, basically.

Hey, it happens. It’s certainly not against any rule for team management to take a deep interest in revamping the roster and cutting costs, especially after a 6-11 season. When it’s done thoughtfully, it can work quite well, as the Rams and Bills have proven recently.

But the 49ers’ sudden turn, after years as one of the top cash-spenders in the league, has seemed too harsh and too disconnected from everything they have tried to do in the recent past not to be noted loudly.

There is, however, an immediate chance for the 49ers’ leaders to alter some of the storyline at this week’s owners’ meetings in Florida after mostly remaining silent through the salary purge — other than John Lynch’s mostly general comments earlier this month to The Athletic and Mercury News at Stanford’s pro day.

Kyle Shanahan’s annual spring session with reporters is on the schedule for Tuesday morning. And Lynch and York almost always speak with reporters at some point during the meetings. I don’t expect that the 49ers’ leadership trio will offer detailed explanations for why they let so many players go and didn’t add anybody of significance. But we should hear living and breathing answers for some very important questions.

Let’s go through some of the questions and offer some potential context for the answers …

OK, sure, York, Shanahan, and Lynch want to win every year. Especially in a season that will end with the Super Bowl held at Levi’s Stadium. The 49ers still have many good players on huge salaries — Nick Bosa, Fred Warner, George Kittle, Christian McCaffrey, Trent Williams, and Brandon Aiyuk (if he’s not offloaded before Tuesday). Brock Purdy might join this list if he and the 49ers can agree to an extension. And they have a relatively easy fourth-place schedule. It won’t be impossible to scrape together a decent season.

And most reasonable NFL observers going into this offseason understood that the 49ers needed to do some payroll surgery, starting with the discarding of Deebo Samuel and disinterest in paying market rate to keep Charvarius Ward, Talanoa Hufanga, Aaron Banks, Jordan Mason, Jaylon Moore, and others.

But once the 49ers lost Dre Greenlaw and failed to land Joey Bosa, it seemed like their top execs decided to do more than merely mitigate the spending of the last few years; they wanted to reverse it almost all at once. Which led to the cutting of Leonard Floyd and Maliek Collins (both signed quickly by other teams) and Kyle Juszczyk (who tested the market then returned to the 49ers for more guaranteed money than he was owed on his old deal). By the way, the 49ers took dead-cap hits on all three players.

None of the losses, individually, likely will be the difference between a playoff berth and falling short. But you’re either trying your hardest to build a roster that can win the Super Bowl or you’re not.

Floyd and Collins weren’t great in 2024. But they contributed. If the 49ers had two or three fewer injuries last season and played better overall, Floyd and Collins would’ve been solid pieces of a potential playoff roster. They could be that again in 2025 — but with the Falcons and Browns, respectively.

So what are the 49ers doing here? I’d like to hear Shanahan, Lynch, and York tell us how this was all planned out. Or we should get an indication that something changed during the course of free agency. Didn’t Shanahan and Lynch come into power talking about defensive-line talent and depth being the most important part of any roster? How did they end up with a new DL depth chart that doesn’t include a proven NFL rotation player anywhere except at Bosa’s defensive-end spot?

I would guess that the efficiency experts don’t care whether the 49ers go 8-9 or 4-13 in 2025. Financial algorithms probably don’t factor in the chance to take advantage of a fourth-place schedule and grab a top playoff seeding. Maybe tanking 2025 to get another great draft pick next year would be beneficial in the long term. But that kind of thinking almost always falls flat in a locker room full of players who might not be around when and if the 49ers turn it around. What do the 49ers’ leaders have to say about this? I’m all ears.

I think Shanahan and Lynch probably signed off on the rational part of the offseason plan. Deebo has always been one of Shanahan’s favorite players, but the Deebo-49ers relationship was never going to last too long. Shanahan and Lynch pushed for the Javon Hargrave signing two years ago and got him. They got Charvarius Ward the year before that. They wanted Bosa signed and in uniform. Same for McCaffrey, Williams, and of course Aiyuk. But the cash spigot wasn’t going to be open forever, especially with Purdy’s big deal due to land this offseason.

But did Shanahan and Lynch, entering their ninth season together, sign off on the complete scale of this? On all the deep cuts and not replacing them with anybody significant? Do the coach and general manager fully endorse this on-the-fly rebuild this late into their tandem tenure?

I suspect that Lynch and Shanahan mostly watched from the sidelines as things moved from normal attrition to the mini purge to my-goodness-who’s-left. And now they have to deal with the ramifications. The most serious one: If the 49ers miss the playoffs again with this less-talented roster, will York accept it as a consequence of the cost cutting? Or will he blame his coach and GM?

Yes, last year’s draft class was exceptional. Yes, Shanahan and his assistants, due to urgent need and the quality of these rookies, disregarded their normal aversion to pushing rookies into the fray right away and gave big roles to Dominick Puni, Renardo Green, Malik Mustapha, and, eventually, Ricky Pearsall and Isaac Guerendo.

But there is a reason coaches are hesitant to play rookies — they can be unreliable and you never know if they can hold up through offseason workouts, training camp, and a regular season. Last year’s class was a rarity for the 49ers and, really, for most of the NFL.

The 49ers have 11 picks in this draft overall and eight in the top 160. I’ve heard some smart people declare that the 49ers can get five or six immediate rotation players from this class. Hmm, really? Here are the 49ers’ picks that fall into that category from 2021 to 2023 …

In 2021: Trey Lance, Banks, Trey Sermon, Ambry Thomas, and Moore. (The Deommodore Lenoir pick was just outside of this range at 172, so I’ll give them full credit for that one.)

In 2022: Drake Jackson, Ty Davis-Price, Danny Gray, Spencer Burford. (Purdy, of course, was No. 262.)

In 2023: Ji’Ayir Brown, Jake Moody, Cam Latu, Darrell Luter.

I’m not cherry-picking. Those are all of the 49ers’ top-160 picks in those three years. Drafting is hard. The 49ers’ personnel shop deserves praise for the good and great picks. Everybody has bad picks. But even in the excellent 2024 class, I’m not sure there’s a future Pro Bowler there, maybe other than Puni. Is this how the 49ers are building the foundation of their next great team? Or just their current cheap team?

Also, if you’re counting on the 49ers reloading their DL in this draft, remember that Jackson and Javon Kinlaw were their most recent top-100 D-linemen. Also, Dee Winters is their best rookie linebacker drafted in the last several years.

As the 49ers try to patch all their holes with this year’s draft, I can’t ignore that many of these holes were created by misses in previous drafts. And that even if the 49ers have scoped it out correctly, other teams are allowed to pick the good players, too. Often ahead of when the 49ers are picking.

The reality is that the 49ers could’ve kept many of the guys they eventually discarded, remained committed to the draft, then lined up all the players in camp and waited to see who won the competition. What was the rush?

There have been no signs of tension between the 49ers and Purdy’s camp. I’ve heard that there’s definitely a path to a deal that both sides see. But that doesn’t mean an agreement is inevitable this offseason. Or into training camp. Or beyond.

Important note: This isn’t about the cap. The 49ers are far under the cap now. They’ll be under if and when Purdy signs a big new deal because the 49ers, like every team in the league, always suppress the early-year cap hits by paying out bonuses to cover the early-year cash flow.

But the bonuses are also what the 49ers are regretting about the recent deals for Deebo, Aiyuk, Bosa, Williams, and McCaffrey. They haven’t paid out a big-money guarantee to anybody this cycle.

So let’s see if the 49ers have a hard cash limit on the Purdy negotiations. I doubt they’re low-balling him. The 49ers’ negotiators are not ignoring that the QB market is much different than every other position. Some of this overall payroll recalculation surely started as a way to fit the Purdy cash into whatever York wanted to pay out this cycle.

But again, let’s see. I thought there might be stronger signs of an impending deal by now. Maybe York, Lynch, or Shanahan can give us an indication this week.

To get deeper into this, the Purdy situation could be tied to Shanahan in York’s mind. Purdy perfectly fits with Shanahan and vice-versa. That’s very valuable. But if York isn’t 100% sure about Shanahan for the long term, would he absolutely want to commit huge guaranteed money for a QB who might not fit so well with another coach? It shouldn’t be a tough decision. The 49ers aren’t likely to do better than a Shanahan-Purdy combo into the late 2020s. But it won’t be cheap. And Purdy has just seen how calculating the 49ers can be about dumping big-money players. Purdy likely won’t need to break all financial precedents, but he’s going into this with his eyes open.

If the 49ers keep Aiyuk past Tuesday, they’ll be on the hook for another $50 million (a $23 million option bonus due Tuesday plus the guarantee of his 2026 salary). Which is why they have been listening to trade offers, once again, for the wide receiver who irritated them so much through last year’s negotiations.

But a trade — with the new team picking up that $50 million — seems unlikely since Aiyuk is still rehabbing from his torn ACL and might not get back onto the field until a month or more into the coming season. If the 49ers can’t make a trade, could they release Aiyuk to get out of the payment? The cost-efficiency metrics would probably tell the 49ers to just keep cutting costs. This would be a huge one.

But you need players. This is the NFL, not a financial algorithm. If you’re paying Purdy, you want to surround him with good targets. If you’re in this business, you can’t ask fans to forget about the win-loss record and applaud the cash savings. There is a line that I think even the most stringent 49ers execs won’t cross. Or at least they shouldn’t.