The 49ers’ build-up to the 2025 season has never truly been about the 2025 season.
No, it’s about 2026 and beyond.
Then again, if something good happens in 2025, they’ll take it.
Sunday’s game against the Seahawks in Seattle (1:05 p.m., Fox) is the first step across this bridge year for the Niners. It’s their first trial in this bizarre experiment they’ve been preparing for the last nine months.
For the 49ers to be successful this season — think making the playoffs and winning a game or two there — San Francisco will have to find a way to get two polar-opposite groups of players to play their best at the same time.
But first, let’s backtrack and re-establish what has brought us to this point:
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After a disastrous 2024 season that netted only six wins, despite preseason Super Bowl expectations, the past offseason in Santa Clara has been about clearing out the old and bringing in the new. Only a select few — quarterback Brock Purdy (five years, $265 million), linebacker Fred Warner (three years, $63 million), tight end George Kittle (four years, $76 million) — were given extensions and serious raises this past offseason. Most everyone else on the roster from the team’s Super Bowl-contending roster who could be shown the door was, in fact, shown the door, and replaced with one of the Niners’ 19 draft picks over the last two seasons.
In turn, San Francisco will pay more than $100 million against its salary cap for this season for players who are not on the roster.
The Niners’ spring cleaning (Deebo Samuel no longer sparked joy in Kyle Shanahan, it seems) has resulted in a 2025 roster of have and have-nots. It’s stars and scrubs, vets and kids. Diapers and… well, diapers.
It’s a squad that’s not quite situated for the now but isn’t ready for it to be the future yet. Call it football purgatory — the Niners are stuck.
And that’s what the 2025 season is about for the 49ers: unsticking themselves.
Can they thread the needle and find a way for experience and youth to congeal into a playoff-worthy team?
It’s a tall task.
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There are a few NFL truths that the Niners are fighting in 2025:
The first is that veterans, with all their wear and tear, often don’t make it through the whole campaign. Can you expect Kittle, Christian McCaffrey, or Jauan Jennings to play 17 games this season? I wouldn’t bet on it — those guys have hard miles on the odometer. Trent Williams (37) can’t be counted on to do it, either.
When those players are on the field, they affect winning in a big way.
When they’re not, well, we saw what that looked like last season. The Niners’ stars couldn’t stay healthy, and they went 6-11 because they didn’t have enough roster depth.
This year, they might have even less depth. The Niners cleared out a lot of NFL experience this offseason.
But then again … they might find out they have more help than expected.
It all comes down to the kids. And that’s a dangerous premise. Rookies are notoriously unpredictable. Per NFL injury-tracking data, a first-year player is 25 percent more likely to get hurt than a player with NFL experience. And beyond the physical toll, there’s the mental one. The game is faster, more physical. Rookies have to adapt. The ones who can slow the game down stick around; the ones who can’t are gone before you can ask them what went wrong.
And if the kids do find success, there’s the dreaded rookie wall. By the time the weather turns, opposing coaches have seen enough tape to find a rookie’s weaknesses. Are they good enough, mentally and physically, to stay one step ahead?
In short: It’s really, really dangerous to rely on rookies in the NFL.
But that’s what the Niners are going to do.
The Niners could start as many as six rookies on defense this season, and the second string of both the offensive and defensive depth charts is littered with players who have limited NFL experience.
Here’s the game plan:
The star veterans, those household names, should be at their healthiest early in the season. They need to put as much hay in the barn as possible, insulating the kids until they get the hang of this whole NFL thing. Then, as the veterans start to accumulate knocks and miss games, the rookies can take the reins.
It’s a risky parlay, but it could pay out big for San Francisco.
It could also look a lot like the 2024 season did.
Any possibility is on the table for this team. Against the presumed easiest schedule in the NFL, there’s a path to 13 wins, the No. 1 seed in the NFC, and title contention. There’s also a path to an even bigger disaster than 2024 and an even higher draft pick as a result. Perhaps no team is as volatile as the 49ers. It’s a good thing they have solid coaching — former defensive coordinator Robert Saleh is back in that role after a three-and-a-half-year stint as the Jets head coach — to manage it all.
But there is one thing that we should see at the end of this season: a foundation.
The Niners’ Super Bowl window — which in all likelihood closed last year — was built on home-grown talent. Those household names are now highly-paid veterans. In the team’s annual quest to win a sixth Lombardi Trophy, they doubled and tripled down on those players, paying big bucks and failing to bring in young, viable players. (The Niners’ drafts from 2021 to 2023 were, in a word, disastrous.)
The Niners believe they have built a new base of home-grown talent in the 2024 and 2025 drafts that can fortify the roster for years to come.
This season, that belief will be put to the test. Trial by fire. And if it fails, general manager John Lynch or head coach Kyle Shanahan might be fired.
But even if they don’t make the playoffs, if those young players prove their worth, this team and the fans should feel pretty good about the team’s bright future. The arrow will be pointing in the right direction for this team.
So what’s it going to be? Sunday is the first of 17 fascinating tests.