It was evident that Dominick Puni wasn’t the same player to begin the 2025 season for the San Francisco 49ers. Puni suffered a PCL injury in August that hampered him through the first month and a half of the regular season.
Per Sports Info Solutions, Puni had 21 blown blocks in the first seven games of the season. He had three apiece in the first two games. From Weeks 4 through 6, he had four in each game. He couldn’t move, and it played out like that.
From Week 8 on, Puni only had one game with more than three blown blocks, and it was against a defensive tackle that Robert Saleh just gave a $100 million extension to. There was a trio of clean sheets sprinkled in during the second half. That’s the player the 49ers are counting on for all of 2026.
Basic Info
Age: 26
Experience: 2 accrued seasons
Height: 6’5″
Weight: 320 pounds
Cap Status
Puni enters the third year of his four-year deal. His cap number in 2026 is $1.55 million. If Puni has a season similar to what he did as a rookie and in the second half of 2025, we’ll get closer to extension territory for him.
Those are somewhat foreign waters for the Niners. Trent Williams and Colton McKivitz received extensions, but you have to go back to June 2018 as the last time the team gave an extension to a guard, which was Laken Tomlinson. They didn’t extend Aaron Banks, despite selecting him in the second round.
What would an extension look like for Puni?
There are clear tiers in the right guard market. Four players have contracts with total values above $87 million. Three other guards have contracts worth between $62 and $74 million. Then you have seven guards between $30 million and $48 million.
Joe Tippmann of the New York Jets might be the closest comparison we have to what a Puni extension would look like. Tippmann was drafted in the second round of the 2023 NFL Draft. New York recently signed Tippmann to a four-year, $62 million extension with $31 million in new guarantees.
Sports Info Solutions has a player metric called total points earned. Tippman has 20, 31, and 30 points earned in three seasons. Puni has fared better, earning 30 and 34 points in his first two seasons.
For what it’s worth, Puni is closer to Tyler Smith’s numbers of the Dallas Cowboys. That’s noteworthy, as Smith briefly set the NFL record for the highest annual average among guards. Smith was selected in the first round of the 2022 NFL Draft. In four seasons, he’s earned 30, 32, 31, and 37 points. The first-round pedigree works in Smith’s favor, as does his availability and production.
Puni will need to improve his consistency to step into Smith’s tier, which is why it’s more likely he ends up with Tippmann’s contract.
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