The San Francisco 49ers have answered quite a few questions on their roster in free agency this week, but one question remains:
What the hell is going on with Trent Williams?
The stalled negotiations, rumored trades, and 49ers social media in a tizzy have still no end in sight. Fortunately, it seems like Williams will be back—for 2026, anyway.
The San Francisco Standard’s Tim Kawakami gave some observations of the 49ers’ moves this offseason and also addressed the Trent Williams question above:
Still status quo, which means Williams almost certainly will be back with the 49ers for this season, though there might be a holdout coming after the 49ers played this a bit awkwardly the last few weeks.
Considering the 49ers don’t have an answer for left tackle at this moment, and there isn’t any prospect, I’ll assume we want to see someone playing their rookie season at that position. This at least gives us hope. We already heard earlier from Adam Schefter and Peter Schrager that trading Williams wasn’t a realistic option. Schefter went as far as to say he didn’t expect Williams to be traded.
And if he were, one would have to think there’d be a potential partner SOMEWHERE during all of this. We haven’t heard anything.
The 49ers do not have a left tackle of the future—or any answer for that matter, which means Williams has all the leverage in this situation. In the same article, Kawakami says he’d be “very surprised” if the first and second picks were not a wide receiver or edge rusher (in either order). If that turns out to be the plan, they might not have his successor picked out this year either.
The 49ers did a lot of short-term deals: Dre Greenlaw and Nate Hobbs come to mind. If they play well in 2026, they might price themselves out of a longer-term deal, or the 49ers decide to make some performance-based decisions in next year’s offseason. Either way, they would need to have replacements ready to go over there as well; adding left tackle to that would not be ideal.
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