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The 49ers Redo Deebo Samuel's Contract to Create $16 Million in Cap Space

So much is at stake for the 49ers this season.si

Grant Cohn

August 18, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Deebo Samuel Sr. (1) watches warm ups before the game against the New Orleans Saints at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-Imagn Images
August 18, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Deebo Samuel Sr. (1) watches warm ups before the game against the New Orleans Saints at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-Imagn Images / Kyle Terada-Imagn Images
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The 49ers keep spending money just to keep their expensive team together.

In their latest move, they restructured Deebo Samuel's contract to create more than $16 million in salary cap space which they can roll over to next season when they'll most likely make Brock Purdy one of the highest-paid quarterbacks in the NFL.

To create all this cap space, the 49ers converted Samuel's $21 million base salary into a signing bonus. In addition, they recently gave Trent Williams a signing bonus worth nearly $26 million, and they gave Brandon Aiyuk a signing bonus worth $23 million. Which means in the past week, the 49ers have cut $70 million worth of checks. That's a ton of dough even for an NFL owner.

And that's what you call going all in. The 49ers are entering Year 8 of the Kyle Shanahan-John Lynch Regime, and they still haven't won the Super Bowl despite spending a ton of money on their roster. Now the 49ers are giving Lynch and Shanahan one more opportunity to make a Super Bowl run with essentially the same team they've had the past few seasons. If the 49ers win the Super Bowl, all the money they spent will be well worth it.

But if they fall short yet again, eventually they will have to gut their roster and rebuild it. And Lynch and Shanahan will be held responsible. And if they don't have Super Bowl rings by then, they just might not keep their jobs.

So much is at stake for the 49ers this season.

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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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