Vederian Lowe Lasted Three Snaps

The 49ers held the first practice of training camp on Sunday, and the most consequential thing that happened all afternoon was an ankle.

Vederian Lowe took three snaps as the backup left tackle, and on the third one he came off with an ankle injury. He did not go back out. Enrique Cruz Jr., a rookie San Francisco drafted 179th overall this year, took his place and worked extended reps for the rest of the practice.

Three snaps.

Everything else went the way you would draw it up in a March meeting. Fred Warner was a full participant, a year after the fractured and dislocated ankle that cost him the first extended absence of his career. Nick Bosa did individual work and no team drills, which is what a phased return off a torn ACL is supposed to look like in July. Brock Purdy was reported at 10 of 12 in team periods and dropped a deep ball down the left sideline into Mike Evans, who was signed in March for approximately that. Kyle Shanahan stood next to John Lynch in a black cap and sunglasses, a small cast on his broken left hand and a practice script in his right, and watched, which is more than he has been able to do since a car accident in Palo Alto on July 14.

It was a good day. Genuinely, unambiguously, a good day.

The trouble with a good day is that it makes you look at the parts nobody drove to Santa Clara to see.

Seven days#

Trent Williams turned 38 on July 19. Camp opened on July 26.

Williams is not being coy about the arithmetic. Speaking to reporters after Sunday's practice, in comments David Bonilla wrote up for 49ers Webzone, he pointed at the two years left on his contract and said the quiet part in a normal voice: "Obviously, you know, it could be my last two years. It's probably the plan." And then, on how that changes a Sunday in July: "I wouldn't say it changed my urgency, but it does change my mind frame a little bit. Like, instead of just coming to work, I actually try to soak it in."

He is still the best left tackle on this roster by a distance nobody needs to measure. He is also 38, and San Francisco's answer for the day Williams cannot go is Lowe, a sixth-round pick in Minnesota in 2022 who is now 27 and has 25 career starts across 46 games, most of them in New England.

The answer lasted three snaps.

Now, camp ankles are usually nothing. Chris Foerster, the offensive line coach who is holding head-coach duties while Shanahan works through concussion protocol, gave reporters no specifics on Sunday, not on Lowe and not on Christian Kirk either, who walked off midway through the same practice with a trainer and also did not return. No timeline on either man. No designation on either man. The only information available was whether they would be on the field the next time the gates opened.

The gates opened Monday. Neither man was on the field. The team has since disclosed a high ankle sprain for Lowe, which is the injury that separates a missed afternoon from a missed month, and a calf strain for Kirk. NBC Sports Bay Area reports Lowe is expected to miss considerable practice time. Still no date on either man, which is exactly the amount of information a team wants you to have in July.

So the ankle is only half the story. The other half is that it took three snaps to move San Francisco off its plan and onto the plan behind the plan, and the plan behind the plan is a rookie who was the 179th name called this year. (Cruz will probably be fine, and he may well be good. He has also never played a professional football game, which is the sort of thing you would rather find out about in November than on the opening Sunday of camp.)

Nobody has done anything to beat him out#

The rest of the open jobs moved the same way, which is to say they moved by default.

Connor Colby took the first-team reps at left guard. Foerster's own framing of that, quoted by ESPN's Nick Wagoner and by Webzone: "Now, he's the incumbent. Nobody else has done anything to beat him out."

Read that sentence twice. That is not a job somebody won. That is a job nobody has taken away from him, which is a different sentence entirely, and Foerster deserves credit for saying it in the plain version instead of the press-release version. Colby was the 249th pick of the 2025 draft, out of Iowa, where he started 50 games. Robert Jones is still in the building, and Foerster says Jones will compete.

Nick Martin got the first crack at the Sam linebacker spot next to Dre Greenlaw. Martin was the 75th pick of the 2025 draft, out of Oklahoma State, and Wagoner's read is that there are multiple options still to work through there. Both safety jobs are open, and Raheem Morris, running his first camp as this team's defensive coordinator, has said publicly that he wants to see every combination available to him.

First-team reps on the opening day of camp are a snapshot and not a decision. (Anybody telling you otherwise is selling August content in July, and there is a lot of August content to sell.)

The move nobody noticed#

San Francisco also did an actual transaction on Sunday, buried under the same press release that put George Kittle, Mykel Williams, Alfred Collins and Isaac Guerendo on the active/PUP list. They signed defensive lineman Kevin Givens to a one-year deal and waived defensive lineman Evan Anderson to make room.

Givens is 29 and has never worked anywhere else. San Francisco signed him as an undrafted rookie out of Penn State on May 3, 2019, and per the team's own release he has played 70 regular-season games with 14 starts, 93 tackles and 8.0 sacks, all of it here, plus nine postseason games. Last season he appeared in five games and made two tackles.

The 49ers announced the length of the deal and not the money, which is their habit this summer. (Adam La Rose at Pro Football Rumors, who is the only person who has engaged with the terms at all, notes that Givens made $2 million in 2023, $2 million in 2024 and $2.05 million in 2025, and figures this one comes in under that. The $2.05 million currently attached to his name in search results is last year's contract. It is not this one, and nobody has published this one.)

Anyway. The reason a 29-year-old with two tackles last year gets a contract on the morning of the first practice is sitting in the same paragraph of the same release. Collins had shoulder surgery. Mykel Williams has a knee. Both opened camp on PUP, both are pushing for Week 1, and neither has a date attached. Givens is what a team signs when it has to answer a depth question before it can answer a health question. (He also already knows where the meeting rooms are, which in the last week of July is worth an actual amount of money.)

Here is the call, and it is a small one, because the beat in late July is made of small ones. Kevin Givens is on the 49ers' initial 53-man roster when it is submitted on August 30. The case against him is straightforward: five games and two tackles last season, and an interior that gets crowded in a hurry if Collins and Williams come off PUP on schedule. The case for him is that San Francisco signed him on the morning of the first practice, which teams do with a roster spot already in mind, and that "if the PUP guys are healthy" has been doing a lot of load-bearing work in this building for two years now.

The 53 is due at 6 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, August 30. The league moved it up two days this year.

Bring an ankle wrap.

Sources. 49ers.com official transaction release and Day 1 camp report of July 26, 2026, and the Day 2 camp report of July 27; David Bonilla, 49ers Webzone; Nick Wagoner, ESPN; Matt Maiocco and NBC Sports Bay Area, which carried the team's disclosure of Lowe's high ankle sprain and Kirk's calf strain on July 27; Adam La Rose, Pro Football Rumors; the Press Democrat on Shanahan at practice; NFL.com on the August 30 cutdown deadline. Trent Williams' and Chris Foerster's comments are from their post-practice availability on July 26 as published by the outlets above.