Niners Nation
The San Francisco 49ers took a different approach to free agency this past offseason, electing to shed veteran salaries and clear their books more, while also letting several players depart in free agency. In return, the 49ers didn’t make any major splash signing, with Luke Farrell’s three-year, $15.75 million contract being the biggest they handed out.
The goal was to get younger and cheaper, while also having the cash to extend key players. So, the 49ers made all 11 of their draft selections, while extending Brock Purdy (five years, $265 million), George Kittle (four years, $76.4 million), and Fred Warner (three years, $63 million).
They looked to replace the departures on defense via the draft, as they took players on that side of the ball with their first five picks in April. It looked like a bit of a transitional period for the 49ers, who still kept a number of blue-chip players but were also looking to develop younger pieces.
Well, they had quite the season, despite losing Warner and Nick Bosa to season-ending injuries, winning 13 games, and making the NFC Divisional Round. Now, with core players getting one year older, will the 49ers look to spend more in free agency this offseason?
At the team’s end-of-year press conference, head coach Kyle Shanahan acknowledged that they did take a different approach last offseason because of their spending in previous years, which made the team’s success even more impressive.
“Yeah, that is a broad question. Good one,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said about the team potentially spending more in free agency. “I mean, last year was a huge challenge. Salary cap-wise and what we’ve gone for, for numbers of years, you can’t do that every year. That’s the way it’s set up. And we had done that too many years in a row, so we had to make a decision to cut on money last year. That wasn’t us being cheap or anything. We actually spend more, almost as much, or more than everybody. That’s what you have to do in the cycle of how it’s all based.
“And more so than the injuries, that was the hardest thing to overcome is how many good players we had to let go out of this building that went and helped a lot of other teams. That’s why when we did have significant injuries to some very good players, yeah it was more daunting than it was in year’s past because some of the guys we would’ve hung on, when you lose a guy like Fred or you lose a guy like Nick, those guys we lost because of free agency and stuff that we had to do because of the previous year. So yes, if you would’ve told me that we lost those guys before the season with what we were going into, I wouldn’t have expected us to have the record and stuff that we did.
“But, that’s when you look at things as a whole and you try to...
