Early Wednesday morning, at about 12:24 a.m. Pacific time, Trent Williams made the first of two grand Instagram reveals in a transformative night for the 49ers’ offensive line.
The star left tackle began by posting a story featuring a picture of himself and a caption reading “forever faithful.” There was a wink tacked on to the end of the text. Could the dramatic, prolonged wait for the announcement of his re-signing finally be over?
Advertisement
The story’s next post held the answer: Yes.
It was a video of Williams bouncing around joyously, shared from one of his friends’ accounts. A caption read “you deserve every penny.” Cheerful voices shouted “red and gold!” and “top of the Bay!” in the background.
Here’s the first video of Trent Williams celebrating a presumably massive contract, seemingly with the 49ers, with the “deserve every penny” text to go with it.
Twitter confirmation from @TrentW71 would be the slam-dunk finish to the alley-oop right now pic.twitter.com/aS5tVJygSF
— David Lombardi (@LombardiHimself) March 17, 2021
Within the hour, corresponding details emerged. According to ESPN’s Dianna Russini, Williams had agreed to a six-year, $138.06 million extension with the 49ers. It’s a record-smashing deal that keeps the All-Pro left tackle under contract with the team through 2026, his age-38 season.
And Williams wasn’t done breaking news.
Just before 2 a.m., he posted a picture of himself and 49ers right tackle Mike McGlinchey in full uniform. Williams tagged Falcons center Alex Mack.
At the very least, Williams was recruiting his fellow former All-Pro lineman. But less than an hour later, it turned out that the situation was far more developed than that. The NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, now awake early in the morning on the East Coast, reported that Mack is expected to sign with the 49ers once his existing contract expires after the new league year begins Wednesday.
Just like that, over two blinks in the middle of St. Patrick’s Day nighttime darkness, the 2021 prospects of the 49ers’ offensive line surged to new levels.
Williams is the headliner of the fortification.
This is the second time he has become the highest-paid tackle in football. In 2015, Williams signed a five-year, $66 million contract extension with Washington to temporarily grab the honors. And now, even though he’ll be 33 next season, Williams has managed to climb back on top.
Advertisement
The extra $60,000 on Williams’ $138.06 million deal makes his contract worth $23.01 million annually — or $10,000 above the previous-record AAV of Green Bay’s David Bakhtiari ($23 million), who reacted Wednesday morning to the news that Williams had narrowly and deliberately surpassed him.
Williams’ $138.06 million total is also nearly $40 million more than the previous record for offensive linemen, which was $98.75 million set by Baltimore’s Ronnie Stanley in a deal signed last year.
The 49ers guaranteed Williams just over $55 million at signing, the second most of any lineman ever (Stanley registered $64.1 million).
Player | Total Value | AAV | Fully GTD |
|---|---|---|---|
$138.06m | $23.01m | $55.1m | |
$92m | $23m | $30m | |
$66m | $22m | $40m | |
$98.75m | $19.75m | $64.1m |
Given such eye-popping numbers, the night brought a natural reflex to estimate Williams’ initial salary-cap hit.
It’s impossible to come up with a precise figure until the deal’s salary distribution is known, but Williams’ $30.1 million signing bonus and six-year contract duration will both be effective mechanisms for the 49ers to keep the 2021 cap hit low — and possibly even under $10 million.
That’s a critical key in all of this because the 49ers have other business to take care of — and the first reminder of that came via news of Mack’s expected signing, which arrived with quickness after the Williams fireworks.
Center, and the interior line in general, has long been problematic for the 49ers. Signing Mack is Shanahan’s solution here, at least for 2021.
Mack will turn 36 in November, so he’s in the twilight of his career. Mack is no longer the absolutely dominant force that he was throughout most of the 2010s, when he won a spot on the NFL’s All-Decade team and earned three All-Pro and six Pro Bowl nods. But he’s still a good center — Mack allowed only one sack over 633 pass-blocking snaps in 2020 — and he brings a critical cerebral ingredient to a line that often looked discombobulated in 2020: Scheme familiarity.
Advertisement
Shanahan was Cleveland’s offensive coordinator in 2014 when Mack was the starter there. Shanahan then left to take the same job in Atlanta in 2015 while Mack stayed behind in Cleveland, but the Falcons offense sputtered through an inconsistent season. So Shanahan lobbied for Atlanta’s front office to sign Mack ahead of the 2016 season, and the Falcons did just that.
They didn’t regret it. Atlanta’s offense surged to the league’s No. 1 ranking and the Super Bowl that season, buoyed by Mack’s ability to orchestrate Shanahan’s outside-zone run-blocking, all while delivering pristine pass protection.
So after Shanahan took over as 49ers head coach in 2017, he looked to similarly improve the center position. Mack was under a fresh contract with Atlanta and therefore wouldn’t become available until this offseason, but the 49ers signed Weston Richburg in 2018 to reprise Mack’s integral role in the middle of the line.
“When you have a center at the level of what you’re talking about with Alex or with Weston, it changes a lot of things, things that people don’t totally realize,” Shanahan said in March 2018. “Sometimes you have to get in certain personnel groupings to help someone have an angle to a Mike linebacker so you can help your center out with the guard. Sometimes you go into one-back. Now a Will’s going to walk outside the box and the angles aren’t as good, but you’ve got a center who can reach someone on his own and doesn’t need the help.
“So, it allows you to do a bunch of different stuff. It really helps the versatility in everything you can do. Not just at the center, but what your guards and tackles can do on other positions. It really helps solidify the whole O-line. I feel that’s usually where it starts. There’s a lot of good players, but when you have a difference-maker at that position, it’s been a lot easier to run an offense.”
Richburg was that type of difference-maker for Shanahan, but only for an abbreviated stretch.
He battled injuries throughout most of his 49ers’ tenure and was only healthy throughout the first three months of 2019. It’s no coincidence that the 49ers offense hummed through that stretch, and it’s also no coincidence that the 49ers began struggling mightily against interior pass rushers after Richburg tore his patellar tendon in Week 14 of that 2019 season.
Advertisement
Richburg has not returned from that injury. He’s undergone knee, shoulder and hip surgeries over the 16 months since and it now seems likely that he will retire.
This whole devolution led to the 49ers’ interest in Mack, who was fittingly the first person Richburg called when Shanahan offered him a contract back in 2018.
“Do it,” Mack interrupted his fellow center, who was asking for advice about playing for Shanahan and the 49ers.
Three years later, Mack has followed his own advice, and that’s brought us to the current reality: He’s set to rejoin Shanahan and don a 49ers uniform in the familiar territory of the Bay Area. Mack is a Santa Barbara native who went to college at Cal, and now he’ll play for the 49ers alongside Williams, another offensive lineman who dominated throughout the past decade.
Inevitably, the biggest concern in both cases — for Williams and Mack — is age. But the 49ers are willing to take a chance on both linemen with hopes that their combined presence can help solidify the entire front.
Williams has proven that he’s still near the top of his game and Mack has shown enough durability over the course of his 12-year career — he’s started all 16 regular-season games in 10 of those seasons — to inspire confidence that he has at least one more quality run in the tank. The 49ers might even re-sign Ben Garland (who also happened to be Mack’s backup in Atlanta) to ensure that they’re properly fortified at center.
A dip into franchise history can provide some relevant perspective when it comes to facing the question of aging linemen.
In 1994, the 49ers signed veteran center Bart Oates. Like Mack, Oates was a former Pro Bowler entering his age-36 season. And like Mack, Oates had a connection to the 49ers: He was one of quarterback Steve Young’s best friends from college at BYU.
Advertisement
The rest, of course, was history. Oates and Young formed the quarterback-center battery of a record-breaking offense and the 49ers won the Super Bowl, buoyed by a cohesive front that certainly didn’t look too old.
That’s what the 49ers are trying to achieve again now, after an unsuccessful 2020 season marred by injuries and porous play up front.
Retaining Williams to man the critical left tackle spot was one domino in that effort. The 49ers were willing to pay record money to do it. Acquiring Mack to provide that experienced glue for the center position was the next step, and the 49ers are also set to do that.
After one absolute flurry of a night, all while most were asleep, both key pieces are now seemingly in tow. The 49ers undoubtedly like what that means for their offensive line in 2021 and possibly even beyond, if Mack can simultaneously mentor a successor.
(Top photo of Trent Williams: Greg Trott / Associated Press)
