Over the past few seasons, the San Francisco 49ers’ defensive line has been one of the stronger position groups on the team.
That is, until 2024, when injuries and lack of production in both the run and pass game haunted the San Francisco front four all season. 2024 was a step back from the standard. John Lynch, Kyle Shanahan, and Robert Saleh hit the restart button, moving on from Leonard Floyd, Javon Hargrave, and Maliek Collins and almost exclusively using the draft to find replacements.
With an entirely new defensive line, that leaves room for plenty of questions. Let’s start with three:
Does the defensive line have enough firepower?
The 49ers were pass-rusher heavy in 2024, with a line that featured Bosa, Floyd, Hargrave, and Collins. Now, three of those four are elsewhere, leaving the 2025 49ers with only Bosa and newcomer Bryce Huff as the only experienced pass rushers on the roster.
Lynch and company went heavy on the defensive line in the draft, selecting Mykel Williams, Alfred Collins, and CJ West with three of the team’s first four draft picks. San Francisco will enter the season with Bosa, Huff, and Williams as their three best pass-rushers, a trio that combined for 11.5 sacks in 2024.
That puts a lot of pressure on Huff to return to his 2023 form with former head coach Robert Saleh now as his defensive coordinator. With Saleh as his head coach in New York from 2021-2023, Huff had 15.5 sacks in 40 games, with his 2023 total of 10 boosting that number. Huff left the Jets to play for the Eagles in 2024, where he regressed to 2.5 sacks in 10 games.
Huff’s 2023 season has proved to be the outlier of his career, but San Francisco is in a position where they need him to play closer to his 10-sack output in 2023 than the 2.5 sacks he’s averaged in his other four seasons.
What can we expect from the rookies?
While Huff will likely only be featured in pass-rush situations, Williams, West, and Collins will play much more significant roles on the defensive line, trying to solve the run-stopping woes of 2024.
Williams, of course, will get the most attention, being the 49ers’ first selection of this year’s draft. Williams offers a run-stopping potential on the edge that the 49ers haven’t quite had under Shanahan. From Dee Ford to Arden Key to Leonard Floyd, San Francisco has tried to put a pass-rusher across from Bosa with varying levels of success. Williams introduces a new strategy, a run-stopper, which they hope develops into a solid pass-rushing option.
Where Williams will help in the pass-rush game is those pass obvious downs where he can kick to the interior, where he’s had some early success in training camp. Now, does that training camp success mean success when the regular season starts? That has yet to be seen, but the early return on Williams is that he can play multiple roles on a defensive line that needs as much help as it can get.
While West and Collins weren’t the 49ers’ first selections, their roles will be just as crucial as Williams’s. After the failure of the Hargrave/Collins interior of 2024, the 49ers went out and got pure run-stoppers to try to stop the bleeding from last season. Both West and Collins have had solid early returns from training camp as well, with Collins getting plenty of notice for how well he moves for his size and how physical West’s hands are.
The defensive line needed a rebuild after 2024, and the 49ers did just that over the offseason. Now it comes down to how the youth movement translates to a defensive line that desperately needs to return to form.
Can Nick Bosa return to his all-pro self?
Nick Bosa earned his massive contract extension after his 2022 season, which saw him earn an all-pro nod and his first defensive player of the year award behind a league-high 18.5 sacks in 16 games.
In the 31 games since signing his extension, Bosa has recorded 19.5 sacks.
His issues haven’t involved getting into the backfield. After 19 tackles for loss in 2022, Bosa recorded 16 and 15 tackles for loss in 2023 and 2024, respectively. His pressure numbers haven’t deterred either, with 95 in 2023 and 69 in 2024, despite missing three games, after his 90 pressures in 2022. The only area where Bosa has faltered is in his sack numbers.
Now, Bosa will have as much responsibility as ever with a brand-new defensive line around him and yet another running mate on the other side of the line. The addition of Williams could help, especially on passing downs. Williams has shown in training camp that he can be a mismatch for the interior of the line, which could translate to Bosa getting more opportunities to get after the quarterback in the regular season if Williams is rushing on the same side as Bosa.
If the 49ers hope to have any success on the defensive line, they may need the production from Bosa to more closely resemble his 2022 output than his last two seasons.
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