At 5-0, the San Francisco 49ers are enjoying one of their best starts under head coach Kyle Shanahan, especially when considering they’ve beaten three potential Super Bowl contenders through five weeks.
The offense has been clicking behind MVP frontrunner Brock Purdy, who has thrown for 1,196 yards, 13 touchdowns, and two interceptions, while completing 69.0 percent of his passes. The defense, on the other hand, has looked quite good despite dealing with injuries to the defensive line, as Raheem Morris
has his unit ranked third in EPA allowed per play and third in points allowed per game.
For years, one of the questions surrounding the 49ers is whether it’s time to push the chips all in and make a splash. Their roster remains one of the oldest in the NFL, and we’ve seen them make some big trades at the deadline, including ones for Christian McCaffrey and Chase Young. We’ve also seen them make other minor moves that have turned out to be quite meaningful, such as trades for Charles Omenihu and even the recent deal for Keion White last year.
The 49ers have the requisite draft capital to make a move, as they have one pick in every round in the 2027 NFL Draft. Is it time to go all in? 49ers legend Steve Young believes so, and he shared his thoughts on KNBR on Wednesday.
“Can we just take this 5-0 and build off it and just take it and run the table and just not worry about anything? I think that part of us feels like, yeah, we probably should,” Young said about the 49ers. “If we’re going to, if we’re going to go all in, and I know every one of these guys, Trent, they’re all going to be irritated that you hear this, but you can’t help it. You get old fast in the NFL. And so when you have great players, you got to take advantage. And so the window, we talk about the window. And it’s like you got these guys that are all healthy, all performing, 4 guys on offense that are going to the Hall of Fame. Like, you gotta go all in.
“It’s like, in some ways, I don’t want to say it’s Ram-like, because you know that they’ve been doing the last couple years, like, they’re going all in. And I’m not saying to copy them because we’ve always been all in. Way before the Rams were doing it, we were doing it. So yeah, I think that we’ve got to optimize like Brock [Purdy] has done with his game. like Mike Evans has brought in, like optimize and make sure that we’re doing everything we can. ‘Cause 2026, I don’t really wanna think about 2027, ’28, ’29. I don’t wanna think about what that looks like. I really think you can smell that 2026 can be that year, but let’s go all in.
How can the 49ers push the chips in? What do they need to target at the dead line?
“Let’s figure out how to bolster, which we think inevitably by December, if our pass rush is middling, it’ll cost us,” Young continued. “It’ll be a problem. And then if we don’t have the depth, because then we can’t keep everybody healthy the whole time, we better have some depth because the Rams are in a really tight spot, but you can see how good they are, and they’re gonna get healthier. Myles [Garrett] is gonna come back and play, and they’re really good. You saw them on Monday night. They got beat, but you can see how good they are. You can see how good Seattle is. And so in that way, they’re not going away, so we should lean in.”
Over the past few trade deadlines, I think the 49ers have done a really good job of assessing their team and status and understanding the time to leverage their draft picks for a move that helps them in the current window. When you look at the two major moves San Francisco made recently at the deadline, they directly correlated with success that led them to a Super Bowl.
The 49ers traded for Christian McCaffrey at the deadline in 2022 in a spot of urgency, understanding they were 3-3 and really needing to turn the ship around. They ended up winning their last 10 games that season and beat both the Seattle Seahawks and Dallas Cowboys in the playoffs before their injuries at quarterback in the NFC Championship Game against the Philadelphia Eagles.
The following year? With McCaffrey in the fold along with their other elite talent, the 49ers, sitting at 5-3 at the deadline coming off three straight losses, traded for Chase Young, and they went 7-2 the rest of the way, winning the division and reaching the Super Bowl, where they fell just short to the Kansas City Chiefs.
It was a similar story back in 2019, when the 49ers traded a Day 2 pick for Emmanuel Sanders, giving them the necessary help they needed at wide receiver to reach the Super Bowl a year after going 4-12. Then, in other years, we’ve seen them make minor moves, like the trades for Charles Omenihu and Keion White, that paid off in that year, but even more the year after with the extra year of team control.
It feels like a pass rusher is going to be an inevitable add, given the 49ers’ state at the position and the number of players that usually become available. Receiver could be a possibility, but San Francisco should start getting guys back healthy after the bye week. Depth, like Young mentioned, could be the other area, which also ties into the defensive line.
The 49ers are certainly going to have competition in the NFC and their roster is getting older. With their current draft capital and how well their younger guys are playing in addition to their veteran talent, it does feel like a ripe moment to push the chips in for a trade or two at the deadline.
