Niners Nation
My role at Niners Nation is to put together the daily links. Every single day, I read every piece of media that mentions the 49ers. This past spring, once the dust settled from free agency and the draft, I started noticing the media narratives coalescing about the upcoming season. If you’ve also been paying attention the last few months, then you’ve been reading the same story told many different ways.
For those of you just tuning in, the narrative goes like this: the 2025 49ers are an extremely age-unbalanced team with a fourth-place schedule.
The Greatest Generation offense should be good (yet geriatric) while the defense has more Gen Z than the Marina on a Saturday night. Every layer of the offense has at least one S-tier player with an injury history, with all of our hope pinned on Christian McCaffrey, George Kittle, Trent Williams, and eventually Brandon Aiyuk staying on the field. Every layer of the defense has at least one proven veteran star (Nick Bosa, Fred Warner, and Deommodore Lenoir) surrounded by unproven youngsters. The push-pull between those inexperienced players helping or hindering their respective “unc” will determine how far this team goes.
On offense, you’re betting on health to set the floor. On defense, you’re betting on development to set the ceiling.
You don’t know how either will go, but you do know that the 49ers are not facing any quarterback on the Josh Allen/Lamar Jackson/Patrick Mahomes tier nor any defense on the Philly/Denver/Baltimore tier. Instead of facing the NFC contenders, they’ll be facing the NFC West. None of their opponents are in win-now mode – there’s no Green Bay that swung for Micah Parsons nor a Washington that swung for Laremy Tunsil. It’ll be Any Given Sunday, every Sunday, until we have better clarity on the offense’s health and the defense’s growth.
This uncertainty is a choice. The 49ers had the cap space to spend more on veterans, but they opted to save money and double down on inexperienced guys on cheap contracts. No matter their raw potential and college production, rookies are cheap for a reason. They’ll make mistakes. You’re hoping that it’s not too many mistakes, and that they happen early in the season, and that these rookies are the outliers that can handle the speed, physicality, and complexity of grown-man football.
That seems to be the rationale that led to the first, second, and fifth pick of the 49ers’ draft: go get the men amongst boys and hope they figure it out. If just two out of three of Mykel Williams, Alfred Collins, and CJ West develop on or ahead of schedule, then this team will have a clear edge against the weak o-lines of Seattle, Arizona, Houston, New York, and Tennessee. The defensive line is both the least certain and the most important position on the entire team this year. For this team to go far, the rookie d-linemen will be a big part of that.
But if you only pay attention...
