The San Francisco 49ers entered this season with one the NFL’s oldest rosters. Then general manager John Lynch swung two midseason trades – for 32-year-old defensive tackle DeForest Buckner and 34-year-old wide receiver Keenan Allen – that boosted his team’s average age even further.
Lynch’s actions have prompted a legitimate question for many 49ers fans: Do he and head coach Kyle Shanahan have an affinity for older players? And if so, why?
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“I don’t think that’s, like, a conscious thing,” Lynch said Thursday morning on KNBR. “We’re not saying, ‘Let’s go find every old guy.'”
The 49ers’ roster sits at an average age of 28.0, according to Pro Football Reference, which is the highest number in the league. They have 18 players who are 30 or older, and that number will rise to 19 in a week when linebacker Fred Warner celebrates his 30th birthday.
“Hell yeah!” tight end George Kittle said Thursday, upon being alerted to this stat in the locker room.
But history does not favor the 49ers in this regard. The last team to win a Super Bowl with an average age of 28? The 2003 New England Patriots, who had a whopping 24 players age 30 or older. No team has won a ring with even 18 players this old since the 2009 New Orleans Saints.
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What makes this 49ers team especially unique, though, is that the large majority of their veterans have never won a Super Bowl. Wide receivers Mike Evans and Demarcus Robinson are the lone players in San Francisco’s 30-and-older crew to have reached the mountain top (Robinson did it twice).
This roster is full of players who have put in time – a lot of time – but have never reaped the ultimate reward. Players like Buckner, Allen, tackle Trent Williams, center Jake Brendel and 40-year-old long snapper Jon Weeks have spent at least a decade in the NFL and never won a ring. For San Francisco’s core group of players who made Super Bowls in 2019 and 2023 yet painfully saw both opportunities slip away, the sting hurts a little more. Think Kittle, Deebo Samuel, Dre Greenlaw, Fred Warner, Kyle Juszczyk, Nick Bosa.
The 49ers own a 7-1 record and look like a formidable NFC contender. This might be their last best chance to win a ring. The pressure is heightened. How do all these factors affect the psyche of a locker room?
“When you have a veteran team – especially a veteran team with a lot of guys who have played really good football and unfortunately haven’t gotten to that part of it – I think it’s a big driving factor for a lot of us. Me included,” said Weeks, who is among the NFL’s oldest active players. “I’m 17 years in, but I’m still trying to get there.
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“So, I think it definitely (is). And if it’s not, you know, maybe something’s wrong.”
Said Kittle: “I think that’s a motivating factor for everybody. I mean, yes, the older you get, the more you realize that you only have so many years in your career. So yeah, that’s the goal for everybody in this building. … I don’t really know if anybody in here needs extra inspiration.”
Lynch joked that Weeks, in his second season with San Francisco, skews the team’s average because he’s so old. “I don’t worry about (his age),” Lynch said. “He snaps the football.”
Weeks’ response: “That’s fine. I’ll take that with a badge of honor.”
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With the way players are nowadays able to recover and treat their bodies, Lynch said, the age factor has become a bit nullified. “I do think there’s some level of, 35 is the new 30,” he said. Lynch added that since his core group is largely made up of older players, it has created an influx of opportunities for the team’s youngsters.
One of those players is 25-year-old rookie Romello Height. The defensive end has played a lot. And despite being one of the oldest players in his draft class, he has been able to pick up daily gems from the 49ers’ veterans. He mentioned Warner and Bosa as two players he looks up to on defense.
“Those guys are great ball players, and their age doesn’t really show in how they perform,” Height said. “Like, those are vets. True vets. … It’s just tremendous to have guys like that on your side as a young guy, because, like I said, they done seen a lot of ball, and they done played at the highest level.”
Height listed Evans (33), Allen (34) and Williams (38) as some of the team’s oldest players who he still believes are playing at a high level.
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“Those guys (are) still moving. Those guys still look like they are kind of in their primes. So I feel like, you know, it’s no biggie. I feel like those guys still gonna ball and perform at a high level.”
“I don’t think that it’s something that we even really think about,” Weeks said. “I think that’s something that is thought about on the outside, and that’s fine. That’s warranted. We’re an older team, but we have a lot of really good older veterans in here who know how to do things the right way, and I think it’s one of the reasons that this organization is successful. They’ve got a lot of really good older players that know how to do it the right way.”
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This article originally published at 49ers are becoming the thirty-something Niners, adding to Super Bowl urgency.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com
