Commanders' cap space bonanza helps them land Deebo Samuel

The end of a wideout's peak is a tricky thing to track

49ers traded Deebo Samuel to the Commanders for a 2025 fifth-round pick

One of the things that makes both knowing and understanding being a general manager so hard is that the end can come for a player so quickly you don’t see it coming. Deebo Samuel has been, for several years, someone who defied everything we know about the numbers.

Who led the NFL in yards after catch per reception among qualified receiver in 2023? It was Deebo. Moreover, he beat his expected yards after catch (per NFL Next Gen Stats) by 3.9 yards, the highest in the league. In 2022, he finished third by that metric. In 2021, he led the league in that metric. And in 2020 … he led the league in that metric. Prior to last year, you have to go back to Samuel’s rookie year to find a non-top 3 showing in beating his yards per expected catch. And even in 2019, he was still pretty good at it. This isn’t a metric that tends to be full of repeaters. A.J. Brown, Jonnu Smith, and George Kittle have also made multiple appearances in the top 10. But generally, Deebo’s ability to create yards after the catch has been the elitest of the elite. Kyle Shanahan noticed and acknowledged that fact by, you know, turning him into a running back at times.

And in 2024, he was … eighth in the metric. So it wasn’t like he fell entirely off the board despite a tough season. But he clearly wasn’t right. And that is what brings us to the real reason the 49ers would want to dip on Samuel now beyond their first-round investment in Ricky Pearsall: Samuel is always hurt.

Samuel has missed games in every NFL season. Even when he does play, he often battles through soft-tissue injuries. ESPN’s John Keim, their Commanders beat reporter, describes the trade like this:

That, Samuel’s contract, and Samuel’s age (29) led to the market not bearing much fruit. The Texans and Commanders were rumored to be the main suitors for a Samuel trade, and the big reason the Commanders were able to do the trade is their surplus of salary cap space. Over The Cap’s Jason Fitzgerald wrote a short blog about the technicalities but the gist of the 49ers trading Samuel is that they take on a huge amount of dead money and the Commanders will be dealing with about a $17.5 million cap hit. The Texans would have needed the 49ers to eat more of the money and/or do a restructure or two, as they currently are barely under the salary cap.

The question that this trade asks us to consider is: Can a 29-year-old Deebo Samuel continue to do the thing that he does best as he starts to lose some athletic ability? If so, how long do we have left? We don’t have access to the medicals. What we have is an NFL that broadly answered those questions with “no” and “not much,” because the 2023 version of Samuel would likely fetch a much higher pick than this in a trade. (And yes, the timing does matter, it is possible the 49ers would have had to release him, etc. If an NFL team thought that 2023 Deebo was walking through the door he would have gone for more than a fifth-rounder in my opinion.)

I don’t know that I’d go as far as saying the 49ers “did well” here, because it’s not like a fifth-round pick is altering the future of the franchise. Most fifth-round picks amount to four cost-controlled years of depth. I won’t go as far as to question if the trade is worth it considering they could have spread Samuel’s dead money hit to the cap around — they know what markets they want to get into more than I do — but I would have at least considered the flexibility of a post-June 1 release before dealing Samuel for a mid-Day 3 pick. They were a year too late rather than a year too early on trading Samuel, and nothing could change that. Given that, you do what you can to make the player happy.

The Commanders grade is pending to me because we simply don’t know what Samuel’s contract will be — I’m assuming they’re going to extend him based on the fact that they traded for him before letting him hit the market. I definitely wouldn’t want guaranteed money on Samuel beyond 2026 if I were a Commanders front office denizen.

I certainly don’t mind the trade as part of a broader talent acquisition strategy, and I’m a little more comforted by Samuel’s advanced numbers after diving into them. It’s very weird from a box score standpoint to trade for someone who has had fewer than 700 receiving yards in two of the last three years and say you “solved” WR2. I like Samuel’s fit in Washington but I wouldn’t be rushing to declare him a WR3 in fantasy football or anything like that. Between the injury risk, age risk, and new team risk, I’m probably holding him in WR4 territory right now.

And, well, this is what a win-now move looks like. Are the Commanders a team that should be trying to win now? They definitely made the NFC Championship last year. I get the sense that NFL stats media is going to spend a lot of this offseason painting them as a team that overachieved their underlying metrics and situation. (Who is the best quarterback they beat in their season-ending push to the playoffs?) Win-now moves can blow up in your face.

The good news is: They didn’t really have to give up anything. And from that part of the risk assessment, it’s hard to fault them for taking this trade. This was a lower-stakes version of the Stefon Diggs trade the Texans made last year. The Commies weren’t likely to find a better wideout in free agency. They weren’t likely to find a better wideout with their draft picks. So you roll the dice and hope Deebo’s hamstrings are good enough to expand the offense in the short-term. It’s a deal that their cap situation allowed to fall into their lap, so they took it.