Given the team’s salary cap situation and all of the players who will need new contracts over the next few seasons, the San Francisco 49ers might have a hard time locking up wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk to a long-term contract, but it sounds like they’re still going to try.
During a press conference ahead of the NFL Combine this week, San Francisco 49ers general manager John Lynch had some high praise for Brandon Aiyuk and made it very clear that the team would like to keep him “for a long time.”
“We have some challenges,” Lynch said Tuesday. “We have a lot of good players, a lot of good players who we’ve rewarded. Brandon’s one that we think incredibly highly of, one of my favorite guys around our building, the way he approaches the game. He’s a competitor. He’s a warrior. He plays with such physicality, also with grace, in the way some of the positions his body can get into.
“And then he’s got a flair for making plays when [they] matter most, and he’s served us very well as a franchise. And I think we’ve got a nice track record of extending the players that are important to us, and Brandon’s the guy we want to keep around for a long time.”
Obviously, with the salary cap, teams can’t always afford to keep every player they would like to keep, so we’ll have to see what ultimately happens with Aiyuk before he is set to become a free agent in 2025.
