The 49ers Signed A Pro Bowl Special Teamer This Morning. He Has Never Returned A Kick.
Two one-year deals, two men waived, and Kevin Givens is gone ten days after he signed. The seventh transaction day in twelve, and the roster is still pinned to exactly 90.
The 49ers announced at 9:59 a.m. Wednesday that they had signed wide receiver KhaDarel Hodge and defensive lineman Ogbo Okoronkwo to one-year deals, and waived defensive linemen Kevin Givens and Cameron Sample. Two in, two out. Counted in a browser at 11:41 a.m., the club's roster page holds 88 active players and three on Active/PUP, which is 90 once Isaac Alarcon's league exemption comes off, exactly where this roster has sat all camp. Both arrivals cost somebody a job, because at the ceiling they have to.
Givens signed on July 26 and was waived on August 5. Ten days. The club's own release announcing him gave seven seasons in San Francisco, 70 games, 14 starts, 93 tackles and 8.0 sacks, which is the longest tenure of anyone this camp has cut. He is the only man to appear on both sides of the same transaction log this summer.
Five defensive linemen have signed here since July 26 and six have left in the same ten days. In: Givens on the 26th, Quinton Bell and K.J. Henry on the 29th, Titus Leo on the 2nd, Okoronkwo today. Out: Evan Anderson, William Bradley-King, Andrew Farmer II, Mikail Kamara, Givens, Sample. That is seven transaction days out of the last twelve, and every one of them paired an arrival with a subtraction. The two linemen the club is actually waiting on are not in either column. Alfred Collins came off the physically-unable-to-perform list last week and Mykel Williams is still on it.
Hodge is a special teams player, and not the kind this site wrote about this morning. The piece that published at 7:45 this morning itemized a $250,000 incentive in Deebo Samuel's contract for a top-ten kick return average, and noted that the club's own Day 6 recap named four men in a punt return competition and no kick returner at all. Signing a Pro Bowl special teamer two hours later looks like an answer to that. It is not one.
Hodge has zero kick returns and zero punt returns in eight seasons. Pro Football Reference carries no return table for him at all, and StatMuse's season-by-season line reads 0 and 0 for every year from 2018 through 2025. His Pro Bowl, in 2024, came the other way round: he was NFC Special Teams Player of the Week in Week 15 that season for getting his hands on two punts, and he scored on a fumble recovery. He has played 1,698 special teams snaps in his career against 1,624 on offense. Last season in Atlanta he took 72 percent of the special teams snaps and 10 percent of the offensive ones, a career high and a career low in the same column. Covering a kick and returning one are different jobs, and San Francisco just bought the first.
Okoronkwo is 31, and the 49ers looked at him three days ago in public. He worked out for the club on August 2 alongside Andre Carter and Xavier Thomas. Ian Rapoport reported the workout and Marc Adams at 49ers Webzone had all three off the league transaction wire that afternoon, which this site published the same day with the line that three edge-rusher workouts said the club was not finished. One of the three signed.
Three numbers on him do not agree, so here they are. The club's release Wednesday gives 81 games, 13 starts, 17.0 sacks and 127 tackles. Pro Football Reference gives the same 81 games and 17.0 sacks and puts the tackles at 132. Webzone's August 2 report of the workout had him at 17.5 career sacks. Two of the three sources land on 17.0 and this notebook is not going to adjudicate the tackles. What all three agree on is 2025: one game for Philadelphia, no tackles, no sacks. The club's release calls him a defensive lineman and the club's own roster page lists him at linebacker. Neither he nor Hodge had a jersey number on that page when I counted it.
Sample was waived, not waived/injured, and the distinction is the whole of his week. He signed in April, on the 13th per the club's transaction log and the 14th per ESPN's, which is the ordinary one-day gap between those two feeds rather than a fact anybody should lean on. David Bonilla's Tuesday injury round-up carried him with a knee. San Francisco has used the waived/injured designation on four players since July 29, and it did not use it here, which means Sample is free to sign anywhere the moment he clears rather than reverting to this club's injured reserve.
The call, and it is a split. KhaDarel Hodge is on the 49ers' initial 53-man roster on August 30 and Ogbo Okoronkwo is not. Hodge is a proven coverage player at 72 percent of a good team's special teams snaps last year, arriving on a roster whose return and coverage units are unsettled enough that the club wrote a bonus for one of them into a contract. Okoronkwo is the fifth defensive lineman signed here in ten days, at 31, off a season with one game and nothing in it, at the position where one of the two men the staff is actually counting on has just come off PUP and the other is still on it. Five defensive linemen signed in ten days cannot all keep a job.
Sources. The 49ers' official release of August 5, 2026, 9:59 a.m., for the four transactions and for the Hodge and Okoronkwo biographies and career figures. The club's release of July 26, 9:21 a.m., for Givens' San Francisco record and for the four names placed on Active/PUP. The club's transaction log and roster page, counted table by table in a browser at 11:41 a.m. Wednesday; ESPN's 49ers transaction log, read the same hour, which had not yet carried Wednesday's moves. Pro Football Reference for both players' career tables and dates of birth, and StatMuse for Hodge's season-by-season return line. Marc Adams, 49ers Webzone, August 2, 1:33 and 2:16 p.m., for the three workouts and for Rapoport's report of the first. Bonilla's Tuesday injury list and the Deebo Samuel contract itemization come from this site's own camp notebook published August 5. Nobody from this site was at practice or in the building.
