It appears the San Francisco 49ers are headed toward an offseason full of difficult decisions.
The salary cap and quarterback Brock Purdy’s impending contract extension were always going to make the 2025 offseason a rough one, but the team’s sluggish 5-5 start to the 2024 campaign is an indicator that significant changes need to be made to their roster.
One of those changes may be parting ways with wide receiver Deebo Samuel.
It’s nigh impossible to envision the Kyle Shanahan 49ers without Samuel. His rookie season was in 2019, the year the club turned around a sustained run of mediocrity and catapulted to the Super Bowl. In that year we saw glimpses of what eventually made him an All-Pro in 2021.
He is a unique play maker whose 1,405 receiving yards, 365 rushing yards and 14 touchdowns in 2021 may be a stat line we never see again from a wide receiver.
Samuel was also a consistent offensive spark for San Francisco, and Shanahan wasn’t afraid to lean on him when the team needed to generate offense.
It appears this season that version of Samuel may not be there anymore for the 49ers. In nine games he’s produced 33 receptions, 490 yards and one touchdown on 52 targets. He’s also carried 27 times for just 79 yards and one touchdown. Of his 27 carries, only two have generated either a touchdown or a first down, and his longest run of the season is just 12 yards.
In Sunday’s game against the Seattle Seahawks where the 49ers didn’t have tight end George Kittle, there was a prime opportunity for Samuel to have a major impact. Instead he hauled in four balls for 22 yards and lost one yard on his only carry of the game.
Samuel’s yards after catch per reception are a career-low 7.7 so far this season. His yards-per-route run of 1.98 are the second-lowest mark of his career. He’s also forced only eight missed tackles on 33 receptions after forcing 40 on 73 catches last year. That trend continues in the run game where he has eight missed tackles forced on 27 carries this year, down from 22 missed tackles forced 43 carries a season ago per Pro Football Focus.
The explosiveness that made Samuel the NFL’s most dangerous playmaker through the early portion of his career seems to have evaded him. It’s hard to blame him given the physicality that defined his playmaking ability.
However, the 49ers need to start devising new ways to create offense, and parting ways with Samuel is starting to look like more of a necessity if they want to turn the page to the next chapter of football in San Francisco.
If they make Samuel a post-June 1 designation, they’ll have a $10,751,753 dead cap hit while saving $5,206,105 against the cap per Over the Cap.
With the type of high-priced contracts the 49ers are holding, that extra $5 million in room would be helpful, and Samuel would be able to find a new opportunity with a team that can differently maximize him.
It also opens the door for players like Ricky Pearsall, Jacob Cowing and Jauan Jennings to be more involved in whatever the next evolution of the 49ers’ offense looks like.
Parting ways with the 2021 All-Pro wouldn’t be easy, and it would be perhaps the single biggest move the 49ers could make to signal that a new era has arrived. It may be a necessity though given everything we know after 11 weeks of the 2024 season.
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