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The 49ers Give Trent Williams $48 Million Fully Guaranteed

So now the 49ers are at the mercy of a 36-year-old left tackle. And if he were to get injured and retire, the 49ers would take a huge dead cap hit.

Grant Cohn

Dec 4, 2022; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers offensive tackle Trent Williams (71) walks off the field after the game against the Miami Dolphins at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images
Dec 4, 2022; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers offensive tackle Trent Williams (71) walks off the field after the game against the Miami Dolphins at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images / Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images
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In the end, the 49ers gave Trent Williams everything he wanted.

Williams held out all offseason for a new contract because his previous one had zero guaranteed money left on it. Until today, when the 49ers reportedly gave Williams a renegotiated deal that includes $48 million fully guaranteed and a $25.69 million signing bonus. Which means Williams now has security. So even if he were to suffer a serious injury and miss most of the upcoming season, the 49ers almost certainly would have to keep him for 2025.

It seems clear that the 49ers' first choice was not to give Williams a new contract, considering he had three years left on his old one and the 49ers waited until just one week before the season to redo it. Unfortunately for them, they haven't drafted an offensive tackle since 2021, so they had no choice but to give Williams every penny he asked for. The 49ers have no replacement or heir apparent.

So now the 49ers are at the mercy of a 36-year-old left tackle. And if he were to get injured and retire, the 49ers would take a huge dead cap hit.

And although Trent Williams is a future Hall of Famer and one of the greatest left tackles of all time, eventually his game will begin to slip. He won't be the best left tackle in the world forever. And the odds of him being the best left tackle in the NFL at 38 are not great. So the 49ers could find themselves overpaying for an old, injury-prone player in the not-so-distant future.

Of course, if they win the Super Bowl this season, no one will care about the not-so-distant future.

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Grant Cohn

GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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