One Year, A Ceiling Nobody Will Price, And Two Roster Spots That Do Not Exist

San Francisco agreed to terms with Deebo Samuel on Thursday night. It agreed to terms with tight end Josiah Deguara the same day. As of Friday morning the club had announced neither, and its own roster page listed 91 players under a limit of 90.

That is the part with roster consequence, so it goes first. Two agreements cannot be processed onto a roster with zero open spots. Two corresponding moves are owed, nobody has said whose they are, and until the club's transaction log carries either name, both men are agreements rather than signings. This piece uses "agreed to terms" throughout for that reason.

The money is a ceiling, and the disagreement about it is the useful part#

Ian Rapoport reported the agreement Thursday night. Four outlets carried it inside 41 minutes: NFL.com at 9:17 p.m. ET, ESPN's Nick Wagoner at 9:20, Pro Football Talk at 9:23, and Niners Nation at 9:58 p.m. PDT. Every one of them attributes the report to Rapoport, which makes this one source relayed four times rather than four sources.

They did not render the money the same way. NFL.com wrote a flat seven million dollars. ESPN wrote that the deal could be worth up to seven million. Pro Football Talk wrote "up to" and added that the base value was not disclosed. Niners Nation wrote "up to" and read the structure as incentive-laden. Three of the four made the figure a maximum and one made it the number, and those are different contracts.

The Athletic settled it with an attribution the relays did not have. Matt Barrows and Vic Tafur report that per Samuel's agent, Tory Dandy, the deal is worth up to seven million dollars. The party with the most reason to state the larger number states it as a ceiling.

No base salary has been disclosed by anyone. Spotrac has added a Samuel row to San Francisco's active-roster cap table with every money column blank. Over The Cap does not list him. A reported maximum that the reporting cannot agree is a maximum, attached to a player nobody will price, is not a rounding error in the coverage. It is the shape of the deal showing through.

A team that believed it was buying the 2021 player does not buy him on one year with the value in incentives.

What the 2025 usage actually looked like#

Samuel turned 30 in January. He played 16 games for Washington last season, his most since 2021, and caught 72 passes for 727 yards and five touchdowns on 99 targets. He added 452 return yards on 15 kickoffs.

The alignment data is where the projection lives. He averaged 5.3 air yards per target across those 99 targets, his lowest since 2022. Sixty-seven of the 99 came inside ten yards. He ran 260 routes from the slot against 141 out wide and 15 from the backfield, so roughly five of every eight routes he ran, out of 416, were interior.

That is a role. It is a short, interior, high-volume role, and it is not the role he had here.

David Lombardi of the SF Standard wrote on July 27 that San Francisco's receiver unit posted the NFL's lowest separation scores over the past two seasons, and that Samuel was traded in 2025 after regression. That is Lombardi's characterisation of tracking data rather than a published figure, and it is his, so it is credited to him. It is also the reason this move should not be filed as an upgrade. The room's stated problem is separation. The answer arriving this week is a 30-year-old whom the same analysis placed among the causes.

None of which makes it a bad agreement at a ceiling of seven million. It makes it a continuity agreement. San Francisco is buying a known quantity who can be handed this playbook in August and already know it, which is a real thing to buy in the first week of August, and a different thing from buying production.

Why the room needed somebody this week#

Christian Kirk, who signed in March, strained his calf in the first practice of camp. Ricky Pearsall has swelling in his right knee that the team has related to the posterior cruciate ligament injury that limited him to nine games in 2025, and he did not practise Wednesday. Matt Maiocco said on KNBR on July 30 that if surgery is required, Pearsall would miss the season. Both tier-one accounts of that question are conditional, no decision has been reported by anyone, and this piece takes it no further than the reporting does.

The timing invites an inference that the reporting does not support. Barrows and Tafur write that San Francisco had been in talks with Samuel and his agent for the last month or so, which puts the negotiation weeks ahead of Wednesday's knee. Three receivers worked out here on July 29 and none of them signed. This was not a decision made on Wednesday. It was an existing conversation that closed when the room got thin.

George Kittle and Kyle Juszczyk had both lobbied for it publicly, on Samuel's own workout video, which is the least surprising sentence in this piece.

Somebody is owed two roster spots#

The club carried 91 players against the 90-man limit on July 30 and still carried 91 on Friday morning, counted from its own published roster rather than from yesterday's number. Two agreements against zero open spots means two corresponding moves are owed. No name has been reported, and the question of who goes is a separate piece that needs the names to be worth writing.

Sources. Ian Rapoport's report as relayed by NFL.com, ESPN (Nick Wagoner), Pro Football Talk (Mike Florio) and Niners Nation (Kyle Posey), July 30. The Athletic (Matt Barrows and Vic Tafur), July 30, for the agent's terms, the length of the talks and the 2025 return yardage. David Lombardi, SF Standard, July 27, for the separation finding. Matt Maiocco, NBC Sports Bay Area and KNBR, July 29 and 30, for the Pearsall and Kirk availability. 2025 statistics from ESPN and NFL.com, alignment splits via Niners Nation. Roster count and transaction status from the 49ers' own roster page, read the morning of July 31. Contract status from Spotrac and Over The Cap, read the same morning.