The 49ers don’t want to pay Brandon Aiyuk what he wants.
And Aiyuk doesn’t want to play for any of the teams that worked out trades with the Niners, either.
And the Niners don’t want what the Pittsburgh Steelers — Aiyuk’s preferred destination — are offering.
We’re four weeks — 28 days — before the 49ers open their 2024 regular season on Monday Night Football against the Jets, and the contract extension negotiations between the team and its All-Pro receiver — negotiations that should have found resolution months ago (either on the contract front or with a trade) are stuck.
While the timing of Aiyuk’s trade demand and the 49ers’ acquiescence towards it are immensely complicating matters, there is, in fact, a more influential undercurrent at play here:
The wide receiver position is a bubble.
Over the last few seasons, NFL teams have figured out what Madden players and fantasy football dorks have known for over a decade —running backs are disposable.
They’re here for a good time, not for a long time. And outside of the truly transcendent — i.e. Christian McCaffrey — to pay a back big money is strictly bad business. The NFL’s salary cap has nearly doubled in the last 10 years, but the number of running backs that count at least $8 million against that cap has gone from five in 2014 to three in 2024.
The reasons go well beyond a reticence to pay a player that ends every carry with a car-crash-like hit. More quants in the front office, the expansion of the passing game and nearly annual rule changes to reinforce that trend, and the proliferation of outside zone running schemes have all played a role in the so-called death of the star running back.
There are also a ton of really good running backs — all poised to plug-and-play in those simpler outside-zone schemes — at the college level.
Why pay top dollar (or even a high draft pick) for a running back when there’s a kid on day two or three of the draft who can do the same job for a fraction of the price?
And why doesn’t this same logic now apply to wide receivers?
Yes, the NFL is all about the passing game these days, but if we’re looking simply at supply and demand, the wide receiver position should be following in the footsteps of running back.
I think the 49ers know it, too. After all, they used a first-round pick on wide receiver Ricky Pearsall, the heir apparent to either Aiyuk or Deebo Samuel (a one-of-one player who was worth the cost, but is in the final real year of his 49ers contract).
I love breaking down the draft, and I’ve been doing it seriously (and professionally) for nearly two decades now. (Let’s not talk about that part.) There were wide receivers taken in the third round of this past year’s draft that would have been first-round talent a half-decade ago.
The pass-happy college game and the institutionalization of 7-on-7 football at the prep level have created a pipeline of receiver talent (and quarterback and secondary talent, too) that will only continue to expand in the years to come.
In 2014, nine wide receivers were making $8 million or more against the salary cap. As things stand, this upcoming season, there will be 28 such receivers.
This, even though offensive coaches can scheme receivers open like never before (thanks to innovations like “cheat” motion and NFL rule changes), and the fact that of the 10 highest graded receivers last season, per Pro Football Focus, seven were playing on cost-effective rookie deals.
That includes Aiyuk.
Why is this market exploding again?
There are 13 quarterbacks set to cost at least $20 million against the salary cap in 2024. Ten wide receivers can say the same.
Something doesn’t line up here, and I wouldn’t want to be a team that’s behind the curve.
Yes, if you have a young, inexpensive quarterback, there is immense value in having a veteran, top-of-the-market wide receiver in your offense to help the kid adapt to the NFL. The Bills did it for Josh Allen with Stefon Diggs. The Dolphins did it for Tua Tangovialia with Tyreek Hill. The Eagles did it for Jalen Hurts, acquiring and signing A.J. Brown. This year’s Bears are trying to make No. 1 pick Caleb Williams’ life even easier by providing him Keenan Allen, just as they tried to make Justin Fields’ life easier last year by adding D.J. Moore.
But all of those receivers were acquired via trade and then signed to big-money deals.
Just look at Diggs. He’s now on his third team, the Texans — another squad with a young quarterback on a rookie contract.
He used to be a Viking. He made the biggest catch in the franchise’s history, in fact. But the Vikings fianlly had an established quarterback, Kirk Cousins, and decided they would be better off trading Diggs to the Bills for draft picks than paying him big bucks.
The Vikings selected Justin Jefferson with the first-round pick provided by Buffalo in that trade. They signed him to the biggest wide receiver contract in NFL history this past offseason, as they are re-setting at the quarterback position with 2024 first-round pick J.J. McCarthy.
Meanwhile, the Bills, now with an established quarterback of their own, made the same decision the Vikings once made, trading Diggs to Houston this past offseason.
Kansas City made a similar decision with Hill in 2022. We know how that’s worked out. The Chargers made the same call with Allen this past offseason — Justin Herbert signed a $262.5 million extension last summer.
Then there’s the Niners. They’re all in on Brock Purdy. They’ve told him, his agent, the media, hell, the entire league that they’ll pay the quarterback whatever he wants at the end of this season. To the Niners, Purdy is established. He’s the franchise.
And while the 49ers want to keep Aiyuk, they are refusing to pay the market rate (as defined by the Patriots’ contract offer to the receiver amid trade talks) for him.
In the Niners’ eyes, the market has outpaced true value, even if the difference for Aiyuk is only a couple of million per season.
And when you have an established — and highly-paid — quarterback, you can’t be spending more than market value. The delta between what Aiyuk wants ($30 million or more a year) and what the Niners are willing to pay him (roughly $26 million a year during the parties’ standoff) is enough to fit a first-round and middle-round wide receiver’s rookie deals onto the books.
Again, the situation with Aiyuk and the 49ers is more complicated than just dollars and cents, but at the root, it keeps coming back to this: Aiyuk wants to be paid what the wide receiver market says an All-Pro should make, and the 49ers don’t believe Aiyuk is worth that, even if he is, in fact, an All-Pro.
And both parties are right.
That’s even if Aiyuk isn’t a truly elite receiver, he is still a damn fine one.
And even if Purdy hasn’t proven he can win without immense talent around him, he’s still worth franchise-level money next offseason.
That’s why we’re still at a stalemate, with Aiyuk showing up to work every day, even if he’s not practicing.
Had the Niners not been so self-assured (or naive) in the spring, they could have done the prudent thing and traded Aiyuk to a team with a cheap quarterback like New England or Pittsburgh. He’d be paid, the Niners would have landed an early draft pick, and the wide receiver churn would begin again, just as it did in Minnesota and Buffalo with Diggs, and in Kansas City and L.A. with Hill and Allen.
But that didn’t happen. The Niners tried to thread the needle between win now and win later and missed.
It leaves us in a scenario where someone has to flinch.
The Niners either need to up their offer or Aiyuk has to lower his demands. There’s been a lot of nonsense between the end of the Super Bowl and today, but the two parties are, effectively, in the same place.
And a trade — as clean as it would have been — isn’t in the cards. It was already a long shot. It’s proven to be a no-shot now.
So how does this resolve?
Who’s to say that it will?
The Niners aren’t going to cave. They’ve made that clear.
Will Aiyuk? He’s been pretty steadfast, even if he did turn down the massive contract from New England.
Either Aiyuk signs a massive contract that leaves him feeling disappointed (that’ll make for a great press conference), or the Niners leave him to play this season on his current deal, leaving us to do this all again this next offseason.
Perhaps by then, the wide receiver bubble will have burst.
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