Report: 49ers were ‘unhappy’ with Deebo Samuel’s weight at end of season

San Francisco 49ers star wide receiver Deebo Samuel seems to have one foot out of San Francisco at this juncture. The 49ers have allegedly given him permission to seek out a trade elsewhere after he had an underwhelming 2024 season for a San Francisco team that missed out on the playoffs.

News that the 49ers are willing to accommodate Samuel’s trade request surfaced just days ago, yet it seems as if maybe the acrimony between him and the team was brewing well before then. Per Tim Kawakami, the 49ers were “unhappy” with Samuel’s weight by the time the end of the campaign rolled around.

“I’ve heard for a few weeks now that the 49ers were unhappy with Deebo’s weight at the end of the season,” Tim Kawakami of the SF Standard said. “Now, he got hurt. Some of this happens, but they were not happy. We saw it. He did not have the explosion. He was not bouncing off of people. He was not running through a defense like he’d done at least two, three years ago. It’s just the reality of the way things develop. And I think at this point, he probably will not be a 49er, but there’s still a chance he could still remain a 49er.”

Samuel is on the heels of perhaps his least productive NFL season in recent memory. Perhaps no stat better illustrates his down year than the fact that he averaged a career-low 44.7 receiving yards per game in what will probably go down as his last season with the 49ers.

Additionally, games when he racked up 100-plus receiving yards were few and far between. He reached triple digits in that stat in just two games all season, with his top performance coming when he totaled a season-high 110 receiving yards against the Minnesota Vikings back on Sept. 15.

For perspective, there was a time when Samuel could consistently be relied on to rack up close to 100 receiving yards on a game-to-game basis. In the 2021 campaign, he averaged 87.8 receiving yards per game and a league-best 18.2 receiving yards per reception.

Perhaps his weight issues played a part in his lackluster season with the 49ers, and that will be something to monitor for whichever team decides to pull the trigger and trade for Samuel to bolster its receiver corps.

After the report from Kawakami that paints Samuel in a questionable light, fans of the 49ers should expect him and the team to part ways soon. Any contending team in need of some additional firepower on the offensive side of the ball should consider dealing for him with the thought process that he can be its missing piece to a Super Bowl run in early 2026.