SANTA CLARA, Calif. — It’s no longer a question of if the San Francisco 49ers will move on from wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk. It’s when it will become official.
At Wednesday’s end-of-season news conference, Niners general manager John Lynch confirmed what has been obvious for months: Aiyuk will not return to the only NFL team he has ever known.
“I think it’s safe to say that he’s played his last snap with the Niners,” Lynch said. “It’s unfortunate. A situation that just went awry. And I will look long and hard at what could have been done differently, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out. And I think that this was a case where that happened.”
Lynch added that a transaction with Aiyuk — a release or, more unlikely, a trade — would come in “due time.” That move will end one of the more tumultuous player-team standoffs in recent memory.
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After an extended contract stalemate in the summer of 2024, the 49ers and Aiyuk reached agreement on a four-year, $120 million extension with $76 million in guarantees on Aug. 29, 2024. Any hope that the accord would get the Niners and Aiyuk on the same page dissipated publicly less than a month later when Aiyuk and coach Kyle Shanahan had an awkward exchange on the practice field on Sept. 27 because Aiyuk was wearing red shorts while the rest of the team was in the required black ones.
It didn’t help that Aiyuk, who did not participate in that summer’s training camp, struggled on the field. He averaged 58.5 receiving yards per game with no touchdowns in the first six games of that season before he tore the ACL, MCL and meniscus in his right knee Oct. 20, ending his season.
Multiple sources told ESPN that the Niners had hoped to trade Aiyuk last offseason, but the injury ended any realistic hopes of a good return in trade, as the demand for an injured player on a big contract never came to fruition.
From there, Aiyuk’s $24.935 million roster bonus for 2026 became guaranteed on April 1, 2025, but problems surfaced again as Aiyuk skipped multiple rehab sessions in the offseason.
That boiled over in July when the 49ers voided the roughly $27 million in guarantees Aiyuk’s contract contained for 2026. Shanahan said Nov. 22 that in his more than 20 years of coaching, he had never been in a situation where a player’s contract was voided.
It was also around that time that Aiyuk stopped showing up altogether and, according to Shanahan, cut off communications with anyone in the building.
“I’d say it officially stopped for me when the last time I tried to get ahold of him and couldn’t and then tried a couple more times and still couldn’t,” Shanahan said Wednesday. “And then that matched everyone else that was trying to get ahold of him to come in. And eventually there’s not much of an explanation because it’s really hard for us and anyone else to understand, and that’s why it’s something I’ve never seen in 22 years of coaching. It’s unfortunate and it’s confusing because it’s confusing for all of us, but it eventually becomes ‘it is what it is.'”
On Dec. 13, the 49ers placed Aiyuk on the reserve/left team list, which generally is used for players who intend to retire or temporarily step away from football. That designation also ensured that Aiyuk would not play at all in 2025.
Now, the 49ers must decide when to move on from Aiyuk and the best way to do it. Because they voided his future guarantees, they will take on nearly $30 million in dead money on the salary cap if they release him in the offseason. They could also designate him a post-June 1 release to split that up into $13.325 million in dead money in 2026 and $21.247 million in 2027. Those same numbers would apply to a trade, though that type of transaction cannot be designated post-June 1 and would require the Niners to hold on to Aiyuk until the summer.
Lynch said Wednesday that moving on from Aiyuk will allow the 49ers more cap flexibility moving forward, especially given the voiding of his future guarantees. That will be especially important with wideout Jauan Jennings scheduled to be an unrestricted free agent and second-year wideout Ricky Pearsall having been limited to 10 games in 2025 because of injuries.
As for why Aiyuk stopped communicating with the Niners, Lynch said “I wish I knew… can’t help you there.”
“You try as hard as you can to fix something that you don’t understand, but it’s not like we understand it very well still,” Shanahan said. “Eventually, you understand that it’s not going to change and you got to move on with your football team.”
