Sam Okuayinonu Went On Injured Reserve And The Long Snapper Came Up
Four roster moves in two days, the last two announced from Melbourne. Two men left the 53 and two joined it, and the club's own roster page had processed half of them by Saturday afternoon.
Sam Okuayinonu started twelve games for San Francisco last season, four times as many as he had started in the rest of his career. He hurt a foot at Wednesday's practice in Santa Clara, stayed behind when the team flew to Australia, and on Friday the 49ers put him on injured reserve. Matt Maiocco has him out indefinitely (NBC Sports Bay Area, Friday, updated 6:37 p.m.).
That is a harder answer than the one the club gave a day earlier, when it ruled him out of Thursday's game and left the rest open. A man ruled out misses a Thursday. A man on injured reserve misses a stretch nobody has put a number on, and San Francisco has now lost him for the season's opening month at least.
Khalid Kareem is the replacement, signed to a one-year deal in the same breath. The club's release, at 6:06 p.m. Friday, puts the two together: "The 49ers have signed Khalid Kareem to a one-year deal. In order to make room on the roster, the team placed DL Sam Okuayinonu on the Injured Reserve List." Josh Dubow of the Associated Press carried the pair the same evening. Okuayinonu's last full season, off that release, was fifteen games, twelve starts, thirty-nine tackles and three sacks.
The nine are still nine#
Kareem is twenty-eight, a fifth-round Cincinnati pick in 2020, and he has played for the Bengals, the Colts, the Bears and the Falcons. The club's release counts thirty-four regular-season games and four in the postseason, with forty-one tackles, three passes defensed, one sack, one forced fumble and one fumble recovery. Last season he played four games for Atlanta and made seven tackles.
That is a thin line for a man signed five days before an opener, and the reason he was signed is not on it. Maiocco writes that Kareem was brought in "in large part, due to his experience in defensive coordinator Raheem Morris' scheme," having spent the last two seasons playing for Morris in Atlanta. Morris is in his first year running this defense. A player who already knows the calls is a shorter runway than a better player who does not, in a week that has three practices in it.
So the room is nine again, and it is a different nine. Nick Bosa, Alfred Collins, Gracen Halton, Romello Height, Kareem, Osa Odighizuwa, James Thompson Jr., C.J. West and Keion White sit on the active roster, counted off the club's roster page at 2:55 p.m. Pacific on Saturday. Ogbo Okoronkwo and Sebastian Valdez are the practice squad's defensive linemen. Mykel Williams is on a physically-unable-to-perform list and is not among any of them.
Six days without a long snapper#
On Saturday, from Melbourne, San Francisco signed Jon Weeks off its practice squad to the active roster and waived tight end Brayden Willis to make room. David Bonilla had it at 49ers Webzone off the NFL transaction wire, and Niners Nation carried the same wire.
The club released Weeks on cut day and re-signed him to the practice squad the next afternoon, and for six days its active roster had a kicker and a punter on it and nobody to snap to either. That was never going to hold for seventeen games. A team may elevate two practice-squad players to a game-day roster without a roster move, each of them no more than three times in a season, and a fourth appearance requires signing him outright. San Francisco has now done the signing in Week 1 rather than in Week 4.
Weeks is forty and in his seventeenth season. He played 127 special-teams snaps last year, per Bonilla. Eddy Piñeiro, Corliss Waitman and Weeks make three specialists on the roster, which is the number a team that intends to kick, punt and hold needs.
Willis made the announced 53 on August 30 and lasted six days on it. He left the preseason finale at Las Vegas with a concussion on August 27 and was practising again by September 1. He was available and was waived anyway.
That leaves three tight ends on the active roster: George Kittle, Jake Tonges and Luke Farrell, with Khalil Dinkins on the practice squad. Bonilla and Niners Nation both read the tight end San Francisco chose to waive as a signal about the tight end it did not. That is their reading of it. What the transaction establishes on its own is a count, and the count is three.
The page and the wire#
By Saturday afternoon the club's own roster page had processed half of its own weekend. Read at 2:55 p.m. Pacific, it had Okuayinonu under Reserve/Injured and Kareem on the active list, and it still had Willis on the active roster and Weeks on the practice squad, hours after both of those had gone out on the wire. A club website trailing its club is not a second account of what happened.
One older discrepancy has not moved at all. The transaction page says San Francisco signed Vincent Anthony Jr., Brandon Codrington, Kevin Givens and Foster Sarell to the practice squad on September 1. The roster page files Anthony under Cut, Givens under DEV, Sarell under Traded to Another Division and Codrington on the active roster. Three of those four movements appear on neither the transaction page nor in any reporting found since.
The week that is left#
The club held a light workout on Saturday local time, takes Sunday off, and begins a normal game week on Monday at AAMI Park, practising Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, per The Sporting Tribune. It is Sunday morning in Melbourne while it is Saturday afternoon here.
The Rams are doing the opposite. They stay in Southern California through Tuesday and hold their only practice in Australia at 4:30 p.m. Thursday local time, at Marvel Stadium, per the same report.
Kyle Shanahan, on why his team left a week early: "The people we've talked to, you don't feel normal until like the third or fourth day. So, we'd like to go out seven days early."
Three of those days are still in front of them. Kickoff is 5:35 p.m. Pacific on Thursday, and 10:35 on Friday morning at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
