Carver Willis Is The Only Name At Left Guard, And He Is Listed Second

Kyle Shanahan was asked in Las Vegas on Thursday night whether Carver Willis was making a push to start at left guard. He said Willis was, and then he said when the answer would arrive.

"I think he is making a push. We still haven't decided yet," Shanahan said, in the availability the club published on August 28. "I really want to see how he did in the whole half of play he got today. We've been putting a lot into practice too, and we'll have to make that decision most likely. I don't want to say by Monday. I don't know if we'll say it then with our opening game, but I think we'll have a good idea by then as coaches."

Monday came. Asked whether the club had settled left guard, or the backup running back job behind Christian McCaffrey, Shanahan gave the same answer to both.

"Don't know yet," he said, per David Bonilla at 49ers Webzone on August 31.

He was asked whether he was simply keeping it from the Rams. He said he was not.

"It's the truth," Shanahan said. "Usually, we get all three of these practices, and then by that Monday is when we come in and usually do leadership council, captains, and, 'All right, this is who we're rolling with.' But we haven't had those three practices yet, and we just added a new guy to the group, too. So, it's truly fluid."

San Francisco plays the Rams at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Thursday, September 10, at 5:35 p.m. Pacific, which the club's schedule page carried Tuesday afternoon alongside the Netflix listing. That is nine days away. The team holds one more practice, on Wednesday, and then gets on a plane.

Twenty-eight positions have a starter#

The club's unofficial depth chart, read Tuesday at 2:56 p.m. Pacific, is stamped August 27. It lists twenty-nine positions across offense, defense and special teams. Twenty-eight of them carry a name in the first column.

Left guard is the twenty-ninth. The first column is blank. The second column reads Carver Willis, and the third and fourth are blank behind him. He is the only lineman in the row and the club has him behind nobody.

Every other spot on the offensive line is filled in the ordinary way: Trent Williams at left tackle, Jake Brendel at center, Dominick Puni at right guard, Colton McKivitz at right tackle, each with at least one more name stacked under him. Connor Colby is on the chart, listed second at right guard.

That document is a week old and it shows. Twenty of the seventy-two players it names are not on the active roster today, counted against the club's roster page the same afternoon: seven of them are on injured reserve and thirteen are on the practice squad. Jarrett Patterson, the man Shanahan spent Monday talking about, is not on it at all, because it was published four days before San Francisco traded for him.

The blank box has outlasted all of it.

Six starts, twenty-one starts, and none#

The competition Shanahan will not call has three men in it, and the club's own pages give their careers in two columns.

Colby played thirteen games as a rookie last season and started six of them. Matt Maiocco, writing for NBC Sports Bay Area on August 27, has him opening training camp as the No. 1 left guard. Casey Lima at 49ers Webzone, on August 25, wrote that those six starts came at left guard, and had Colby holding his own in the run game while pass protection lagged.

Patterson has thirty-nine games and twenty-one starts, all with Houston, which drafted him in the sixth round in 2023 and used him for seven starts as a rookie, nine in 2024 and five last year. He has three more starts across four postseason games. San Francisco announced the trade for him on Monday and gave up its 2027 seventh-round pick.

Willis has none. The club's roster page lists him with no years of experience, and Maiocco has him as a fourth-round pick who played tackle in college and was seen as an interior lineman for the professional game. He has not taken a regular-season snap.

The rookie is the one on the chart.

The job has been decided by who was available#

Maiocco's August 27 account is the clearest record of how the left guard reps have moved, and it does not read like a competition anybody won.

Colby opened camp with the first team. Robert Jones, a veteran, was competing with him early. Willis got into the mix after that. A week before the finale, Austen Pleasants took snaps there too. Then Jones hurt a calf and Pleasants hurt a knee, and, in Maiocco's words, the 49ers went back to Willis.

Willis played the whole first half at left guard in Las Vegas, which is the half Shanahan said he wanted to watch. Maiocco thought he handled both pass protection and the second level well, and wrote that it would seem to suggest Willis is the favorite to open the season in the starting lineup.

The charting from that half reads the other way. Pro Football Focus released its grades on August 28 and ranked Willis last among San Francisco's offensive linemen in the game he started, giving Colby the best pass-blocking grade of the night. It was the second time in eight days: Willis graded last among the eleven linemen charted at the Chargers on August 20, a week after grading first on the whole team against Tennessee. The eye and the chart watched the same snaps.

Two of the four men who took reps at the position are no longer available to take them. San Francisco released Jones on Sunday. Lima counted twenty-four career starts at left guard for Jones on August 25, including all seventeen games for Miami last season. Pleasants is on injured reserve, one of eleven names on that page.

So the club replaced them. Patterson arrived Sunday for a seventh-round pick, and Shanahan said Monday he wants to see the man in person before deciding anything.

"We love that he has some flex at center and guard," Shanahan said, per Bonilla. "It's still fluid in all our positions in there, so I want to see where he fits in the group in these three days. That is the hard thing with not just going to Australia, but just not opening on a Sunday. The time that we're usually used to making some of these decisions have all been sped up."

Tuesday, and one practice left#

Nine 49ers did not take part in the open portion of Tuesday's practice, per Nick Wagoner of ESPN: Nick Bosa, Jacob Cowing, Mike Evans, Luke Gifford, Gracen Halton, Romello Height, Kyle Juszczyk, Renardo Green and Ephesians Prysock. Reporters are permitted to watch warmups and individual drills before leaving, so the list describes the part of the session they saw.

Not one offensive lineman is on it. All nine linemen on the active roster were available Tuesday.

At 1:24 p.m. Pacific the club announced four more practice squad signings, and one of them plays the position in question. Foster Sarell is a six-foot-seven tackle out of Stanford who has appeared in forty-one games across five seasons with five teams and started four of them, one of those last year with the Chargers. He joins Isaac Alarcon and Drake Nugent on the practice squad. Add Brett Toth, Nick Zakelj and Pleasants on injured reserve and San Francisco now holds six offensive linemen off its active roster and nine on it.

Nine days#

Los Angeles has one question fewer. Aaron Donald is on the Rams' active roster at defensive tackle, and their transaction page records how he got there in a single line dated August 30: "DL Aaron Donald officially comes out of retirement." No terms, no explanation, one sentence in the same block that lists the twenty-eight men Los Angeles waived that day.

Shanahan said Saturday will work as the team's usual game-week Monday once everybody is in Australia. That gives him one practice in Santa Clara, a flight, and a short week on the far end.

The Rams list Donald with eleven years of experience. San Francisco lists Willis with none, in the second column, behind nobody.