Niners Nation
The 49ers are starting a major rebuild, but these three secret superstars could make that process much more pleasant.
If you believe in the Super Bowl Loser’s Curse, you may be a San Francisco 49ers fan of recent vintage.
In 2020, after they lost the Super Bowl to the Kansas City Chiefs, the 49ers experienced an unexpectedly down season in which they won just six games, had a metric crap-ton of players on injured reserve, and became well aware that it was time to remake the roster.
In 2024, after they lost the Super Bowl to the Kansas City Chiefs, the 49ers experienced an unexpectedly down season in which they won just six games, had a metric crapton of players on injured reserve, and became well aware that it was time to remake the roster.
So... here we are again. At the 2025 scouting combine, general manager John Lynch warned everybody that the Band-aid was about to come off from a personnel perspective.
“I think since [head coach] Kyle [Shanahan] and I have been here, we’ve certainly been a top-five … I believe, the No. 2 cash-spending team,” Lynch said in late February. “In the last four years going into the fifth year, I think we’re the fourth-highest cash-spending team. At some point, you have to reset a little bit, or at least recalibrate.
“You can’t just keep pressing the pedal. I think there is some good that can come out of it. We need to get younger.”
Lynch wasn’t kidding, of course. The Deebo Samuel trade was just the first step. In free agency, the team motto may as well have been, “Last one out the door, hit the lights.” The short-term bleed of talent has a lot to do with getting dead cap money out of the building in 2025, and Lynch and Shanahan have built up enough equity to make such a drastic rebuild an employable reality.
Plus, they’ve done this before. The list of players shown the door in 2021 was a lot like this last list, and we all saw how well it worked in the end. With all that new blood, the 2021 49ers went 10-7 in the regular season, and came a few plays away from beating the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Championship game.
If the 2025 49ers are to reclaim that kind of competitive fire despite a from-the-studs redo, here are three players who will help a lot. In the continuation of our “Hidden Gems” series, we have one underrated veteran, free-agent acquisition, and draft pick the 49ers will hope to see amplifying things from Day 1 in a very different environment.
The 49ers took Lenoir with the 173rd overall pick in the fifth round of the 2021 draft out of Oregon, and that’s proven over time to be quite the steal — especially during Lenoir’s career year in 2024. Last season, Lenoir allowed 58 catches on 89 targets for 547 yards, 346...
