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Can a team with a coach going into his ninth season and several veterans who recently landed huge new deals truly get spiritually refreshed and competitively reborn over just one offseason?
Well, after a lot of close calls in playoff games in recent years and then last year’s not-close-to-anything splattering, the 2025 49ers sure are going to try. And they are talking like it has already started happening.
Actually, Kyle Shanahan said after Thursday that the renewal process began in his last speech to the team last season, right after the miserable trudge to a 6-11 record. That was the bottom. That was a terrible way to end 2024 … but maybe the best way to start down a different road to whatever happens in 2025 — with a whole bunch of new players but the same championship goal.
“We all know how disappointed we are and a lot of us have played a lot of football here,” Shanahan recalled telling his players back in January. “But we’re going to have a team that doesn’t know what we’ve done in the past or how you guys have earned a lot of stuff. We need to show them. And the first meeting when we get back, I expect our whole team to be here, and it be important to guys.”
So what happened in the first team meeting a few weeks ago at the start of the offseason program? Full attendance. A signal to the new players about the 49ers’ standards and expectations. The first sign that this not only wouldn’t be like 2024 but that the players knew it couldn’t be at all like 2024.
And a very happy coach.
“I thought the coolest thing was everyone being there on the first day,” Shanahan said. “We had every guy show up and I didn’t have to call anyone and beg them, which said a lot. They all knew what I said on the last day and I wanted to see if they really meant something to them, not to where I had to call them and remind them. And I didn’t. And they all showed up and they’ve all been working and to me that’s something I really appreciated and know I’ve got the right guys.”
Which, Shanahan and several players noted, seems to have funneled a ton of energy to the practice field, too. Other than the players who are still injured, the only notable player missing from the field on Thursday was Trent Williams, whom Shanahan said had been at the facility earlier in the offseason and is expected to be back soon.
Part of this evolution is natural because the 49ers went deep into the playoffs in 2021, 2022, and 2023, and were a very tired team going into last offseason. But missing the playoffs entirely last season, while vastly disappointing, gave the core veterans extra time to heal up and more motivation to get a jump on OTAs, next month’s minicamp, and then, of course, training camp.
“Missing the playoffs is absolutely terrible, and I don’t suggest it for anybody,” George Kittle said. “But if you do, you have to take advantage of that extra month off.”
On Thursday — the team’s second on-field OTA but the first one open to the media — Christian McCaffrey was racing through the defense, looking fully healthy for the first time since the 2023 season. Nick Bosa looked peppy. The rookies soaked everything up and bounced around a lot, too. First-round pick Mykel Williams looked like he wanted to tackle the ball carrier and about three blockers on every one of his team reps. (Of course, because OTAs take place without pads and mostly without helmets, no tackling or even hard pushing was allowed.) Everyone looked quite lively.
“I just think everybody’s so eager to be back in the building, be back on the field, competing again,” George Kittle said. “I think that’s just really good for this building. Kind of like a mild refresh or mild restart. Everyone’s just so excited to be here. You can see that, too, from all the vets that are here. Years past, I’d say it was, what, 75% of the guys show up? And now we’re at whatever it is, 99%?”
You also can feel how important it was to get Robert Saleh back for his second stint as defensive coordinator after Shanahan ran through Nick Sorensen last year and Steve Wilks in 2023. The 49ers needed a DC who commands instant respect and confidence. They needed a DC who can be a partner with Shanahan. They needed somebody they knew could do the job.
And on Thursday, Shanahan and Saleh walked out to the field together, they huddled through the early drills, and they laughed and chatted throughout the team sessions, when it was Shanahan’s offense going up against Saleh’s defense. I watched a lot of practices the past two years, and Shanahan never looked that comfortable talking with Wilks or Sorensen. And there’s a new flavor to their relationship after Saleh’s up-and-down run as the Jets’ head coach.
“I don’t have to get on him as much,” Shanahan said with a laugh. “He knows. No, because it’s funny when you hear stories of, ‘Oh, now I get why you were so frustrated with me in this instance because I thought you were being kind of a jerk about it.’ He goes, ‘But I was twice as mean to my guy the last two years on it.’ So you start to learn those things as you go through them and it kind of makes it a little more fun.”
So it sounds good. Of course, plenty of proud and confident words have been spoken by plenty of teams during May and June, and often those statements have had no correlation whatsoever to winning and losing games during the season.
But the 49ers have some credibility speaking about the new vibes, mostly because they lived through the dour mood (thanks to the thorny contract negotiations with Williams and Brandon Aiyuk) and general frustration of the past calendar year.
This offseason, the 49ers’ front office discarded a handful of starters in order to cut down the payroll commitment — which makes all of these new young players very important immediately. But in direct contrast to the previous two years, when the 49ers dragged out negotiations with Aiyuk, Williams, and Nick Bosa right to the brink of the regular-season opener, this year the 49ers signed Brock Purdy, Fred Warner, and Kittle to contract extensions totaling $404 million all before the first OTA.
Did 49ers management learn from last season or just decide it never wanted to experience anything similar ever again? Whatever the reason, it has been quite different this offseason. The 49ers aren’t as talented as they were last season, but they are younger, more rested, and far less anxious.
They did what Shanahan asked them to — show up on Day 1 — and they got a good start on 2025. They reset the mood. Maybe the 49ers also started to reset the direction of this era, which absolutely needed it.