Game Week

San Francisco won by 20 without a sack. Miami gave up five.

Kickoff is 1:25 p.m. Pacific at Levi's Stadium on FOX. The 49ers are 1-0 and got eight quarterback hits without a sack in Melbourne. The Dolphins are 0-1, start the youngest roster in the league, and gave up five sacks at Las Vegas. Eddy Piñeiro is questionable after three days away from practice, and San Francisco carries one kicker.

SK
Sam KezarSep 20, 20264 min read
Every call on this site goes on a public ledger and gets graded. The misses stay up.
Nick Bosa photographed from the chest up on a field after a game, grinning, hair and beard wet, his white 49ers road jersey streaked with mud and grass. The red 97 and the 49ERS wordmark are legible, and the NFL 100 patch at the collar dates the photograph to the 2019 season. Empty red stadium seats behind him.

San Francisco plays Miami at Levi's Stadium on Sunday at 1:25 p.m. Pacific, on FOX, with the radio call on KSFO 810 AM and KSAN 107.7 FM. That is off the club's schedule page and ESPN's, both read at 5:11 a.m. Sunday. The 49ers are 1-0 after beating the Rams 27-7 in Melbourne. The Dolphins are 0-1 after losing 27-13 at Las Vegas.

The defense that won the opener never got to the quarterback. San Francisco's row on the game book's Final Defensive Statistics page reads zero sacks, eight quarterback hits and two tackles for loss across 61 defensive snaps. Osa Odighizuwa had four of the eight hits. Nick Bosa had one, plus both tackles for loss, on 36 of the 61 snaps.

Miami's line is where that pressure goes this week. Malik Willis was sacked five times at Las Vegas and the Dolphins converted two of ten third downs.

The kicker, which is still the live question#

Eddy Piñeiro is questionable with an illness. He did not practice Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, per the club's final Week 2 injury report, filed by Brooke Evans at 4:46 p.m. Friday. Matt Maiocco of NBC Sports Bay Area reported Saturday afternoon that the 49ers expect him to play.

San Francisco worked out Younghoe Koo and Greg Joseph on Saturday, per Maiocco, and signed neither. That was not the stated plan. Kyle Shanahan said Friday the club intended to add a kicker to the practice squad as a contingency. The transaction page, read at 5:12 a.m. Sunday, still ends on September 16.

So Piñeiro is the whole kicking plan. He took 12 of the 20 special-teams snaps in Melbourne and scored nine of San Francisco's 27 points. The inactive list posts 90 minutes before kickoff.

Injuries, and the one that changed after the report closed#

De'Zhaun Stribling was listed OUT with an ankle on Friday's report. On Saturday at 1:59 p.m. the club went further and placed him on injured reserve, promoting defensive lineman Ogbo Okoronkwo to the active roster in the same release. Injured reserve costs a player four games, so the rookie receiver returns in Week 6 at the earliest.

Kaelon Black is questionable with a groin. Shanahan on him, in his weekly KNBR interview, as David Bonilla rendered it at 49ers Webzone on Thursday: "I think we're just being smart with him. He was a little tight today, so we didn't push him too hard."

Twelve 49ers are on the report and three carry a designation: Stribling, Piñeiro and Black. The other nine are clear. Bosa, Dre Greenlaw, Christian McCaffrey and Trent Williams were rested rather than hurt on Wednesday and full after it. George Kittle and Kyle Juszczyk were limited twice, then full Friday. Kittle, on the Achilles he tore in January: "I'm so confident in my Achilles, the calf, the whole thing. There's been zero setbacks."

Miami is without Ronnie Harrison, hamstring, and Chop Robinson, concussion, both listed as linebackers and both OUT.

What Shanahan is worried about#

Not the record. Miami starts the youngest roster in the league by average age, 25.5, with 13 rookies on the active list and seven of them starting in Week 1. Rookie receiver Caleb Douglas led them with 94 yards in the opener.

Shanahan's worry is narrower, and he gave it to Maiocco this week. It is Willis running, and the carries De'Von Achane gets once a defense has to account for the quarterback. "How you rush them, how you play each run play, you never know when he's gonna pull it and go," Shanahan said. On Achane: "I knew he was good, I knew he was really good. But he's even better than I thought."

Willis ran for 39 yards and a touchdown at Las Vegas. Achane took 11 carries for 36.

Ten to watch#

Nobody spent the week on the offensive line, which played every down. Brendel, Colby, Puni, McKivitz and Williams each took all 65 snaps, and the club's roster page has Williams in his 17th season. He is the one the staff sat down on Wednesday.

Sources: 49ers.com schedule, injury report and transactions pages, read Sunday morning; the official NFL game book for San Francisco at Los Angeles, Week 1; Matt Maiocco, NBC Sports Bay Area; Marc Adams and David Bonilla, 49ers Webzone; Brooke Evans, 49ers.com; ESPN team statistics and schedules.

Filed under 49ers

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The NFL's official game book for Week 1 puts George Kittle at 30 of San Francisco's 65 offensive snaps and 46 percent, Luke Farrell at 46 snaps and 71 percent, and Jake Tonges at eight snaps and 12 percent before he was hurt. Farrell also played 18 of the 49ers' 20 special-teams snaps, the highest special-teams snap share of any San Francisco player in the game. Kittle started; Farrell did not. Shanahan's postgame words on Tonges were an MCL with no timetable, and as of 2:50 p.m. Pacific Monday the club's transaction log still ends on September 10, Tonges is still on the active roster page, and the Week 2 injury report page carries no San Francisco table. The only other tight ends the club employs, Khalil Dinkins and Brayden Willis, are on the practice squad.

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Through Week 4, PFF's grades rank A'Shawn Robinson 2nd of 113 interior defensive linemen against the run and 78th as a pass rusher. The 49ers' two interior regulars rank 108th and 101st against the run. Robinson is on a one-year, $10 million deal with no dead money for Tampa Bay if traded, and the 49ers would carry about $2 million of it against $41.4 million in cap space. From 2021 to 2025, two deadline-window trades involved an interior lineman aged 29 or older on an expiring deal: Johnathan Hankins for a sixth-round pick swap and Leonard Williams for a second and a fifth. Robinson's profile sits much closer to Hankins.

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San Francisco did not sack Bo Nix in Sunday's 24-14 win over Denver and hit him twice, both in the fourth quarter. The zero was mostly Denver's design: Nix threw 36 of 42 passes short, Denver had allowed five sacks in three games, and the 49ers' own priority was keeping Nix in the pocket, which held him to two scrambles. The season numbers say something else. With Nick Bosa the 49ers were credited with 13 quarterback hits on 55 opponent pass plays; without him, 7 on 96. Bosa had one of the 13. Osa Odighizuwa had five, and he has had none since Bosa got hurt. Bosa is not expected back for Seattle.

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San Francisco placed DL Alfred Collins on injured reserve and activated WR KhaDarel Hodge and DL Ogbo Okoronkwo from its practice squad as standard elevations, all three moves in one release published at 1:53 p.m. Pacific on Thursday, three hours and forty-two minutes before the season opener against the Los Angeles Rams at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Hodge and Okoronkwo revert to the practice squad after the game, and a standard elevation is capped at three per player per season. Neither plays defensive tackle. The club's depth chart, stamped September 8 and labelled unofficial, lists four men at the two tackle spots: Osa Odighizuwa at 280 pounds and C.J. West at 316 on the left, Collins and then rookies Gracen Halton at 293 and James Thompson Jr. at 308 on the right. Thompson was Questionable with a hamstring, the only game designation San Francisco issued for the opener. The inactive lists resolved it: six San Francisco names, none of them a defensive lineman, and Thompson dresses. That leaves right defensive tackle to two rookies. The report the club distributed at 12:23 a.m. Pacific has Halton at full participation for the last Melbourne practice; the table on the club's own injury-report page, read at 2:51 p.m., still showed him limited and left his injury column blank. The practice squad holds three defensive linemen heavier than Okoronkwo's 253 pounds, including Kevin Givens, the man the club waived on August 5 to sign Hodge and Okoronkwo. Counted in a browser at 2:53 p.m. Pacific, the roster page carried 54 on Active, 12 on injured reserve, two on Reserve/Physically Unable to Perform and 15 on the practice squad, which puts 52 players on a roster that may hold 53. The Active table held eight defensive linemen. The transaction log still ended on September 5. One take filed.

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On the record

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Connor Colby is listed as San Francisco's starting left guard in the official starting lineup of the 49ers' Week 1 game against the Los Angeles Rams on 2026-09-10. If Robert Jones, Carver Willis, Brett Toth or anybody else starts there, the take is scored wrong.

Filed on the day the reporting went the other way, which is the point of filing it today. David Lombardi had Robert Jones taking the first-team left guard reps at the August 5 practice, the first published rep at the position since July 26. Chris Foerster's own explanation for it was that the staff wanted to keep moving Colby around, including at right guard, and that Carver Willis in concussion protocol and an undisclosed injury to Brett Toth limited that plan. So the alignment was a consequence of two absences rather than a decision about Colby, and the only unforced statement anybody has made about this competition is still Foerster's from the opening Sunday, when Colby took all the first-team reps and nobody had done anything to beat him out. What would make me wrong: Jones holding the first-team reps once Willis and Toth are back.

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