San Francisco Has Never Been Over The Roster Limit. The 91st Man Has A Name And An Exemption.

Isaac Alarcon is the 67 in the offensive line group on the 49ers' roster page, he is 28, he went to Tecnologico de Monterrey, and he has never played a regular-season down. He is also the reason this beat has printed a number with a hole in it for a week.

The NFL granted San Francisco a roster exemption for Alarcon on April 28. Aaron Wilson reported it; Niners Wire carried it the same day. The exemption is the International Player Pathway kind and its effect is stated plainly: Alarcon does not count toward the club's 90-man offseason roster, and he starts counting only when the roster is cut to 53.

So the count is 90 against a limit of 90. Not 91 against 90.

This site has published the raw number three times and hedged it correctly once. The tracker column of July 30 laid out both available readings, said which exemption Alarcon holds "has never been established here," and concluded zero open roster spots under either. That answer was right and survives untouched. The other two are the ones that need saying: a July 31 piece put "91 players under a limit of 90" in a deck and a body paragraph, and a second July 31 piece went further and called it "one body more than the rules allow." The club has not been over the limit at any point this camp, and it has not carried a body the rules do not allow. It has been sitting precisely on the ceiling, which is a different fact with the same consequence and a better explanation attached.

What sitting on the limit does to a Sunday#

It means every arrival is paid for by name, and Sunday is the cleanest demonstration camp has produced.

San Francisco announced four moves at 1:25 p.m.: running back Khalil Herbert and defensive lineman Titus Leo signed to one-year deals, cornerback Eli Apple waived, defensive lineman Mikail Kamara waived/injured. Two in, two out, net zero, which is the only arithmetic available to a club with no open spots and is now the shape of ten transactions across three days.

The two positions were chosen by Saturday rather than by the front office. The 49ers practised Saturday morning and lost bodies out of exactly two rooms. Kamara left on a cart with a knee. Keion White did not finish with an adductor issue and Romello Height sat with an elbow, which thinned an edge group already missing Mykel Williams to the physically-unable-to-perform list. In the backfield, Jordan James has fractured ribs and Kaelon Black started practice and did not finish it, the latter reported by Nick Wagoner at ESPN and absent from other lists filed the same afternoon.

Sunday the club signed a running back and a defensive lineman.

Herbert has a job attached to him#

Herbert is 28. Chicago took him in the sixth round, 217th overall, in 2021, and the club's release runs the career without decoration: 63 games and 13 starts across the Bears, the Bengals and the Jets, 416 carries for 1,957 yards and nine touchdowns, 54 receptions for 316 yards and two more. His 2025 was seven games in New York, 16 carries, 52 yards.

The room he joins, counted off the club's page Sunday afternoon, is McCaffrey, James, Black, Patrick Taylor Jr. and Sincere McCormick, with Kyle Juszczyk at fullback and Isaac Guerendo on PUP. Herbert is the sixth back on a roster that will keep four, arriving on day eight, at a position where the man directly above him has broken ribs and the man below him walked off Saturday's practice for a reason nobody has published.

Leo is not the last defensive lineman#

Leo is 26, a sixth-round pick of Indianapolis in 2023, 211th overall out of Wagner. Four career games, one tackle, one pass defensed, five teams in three years, and a 2025 that consisted of Philadelphia's practice squad from October 15 to December 30. He is the fourth defensive lineman San Francisco has signed since July 26, after Kevin Givens that day and Quinton Bell and K.J. Henry on the 29th.

He is also not the end of it. The club worked out three edge rushers Sunday, all three off the league transaction wire and all three reported by Marc Adams at 49ers Webzone: Andre Carter and Xavier Thomas in a post filed at 12:37 p.m., Ogbonnia Okoronkwo in a second one at 1:00. Adams is the only place any of it has appeared. A club that signs a defensive lineman at 1:25 and has worked out three more edge rushers the same day is telling you the room is not fixed. The line has been this roster's churn engine since the first week of camp, and Saturday accelerated it rather than starting it.

Apple came out of the one room that did not break#

The corner group lost nobody Saturday. Apple came off it anyway, on a Reserve/Future deal he signed January 20, because two signings need two spots and Kamara's was only one of them. That is what zero open spots buys: a healthy player at a healthy position loses a job because a defensive lineman got hurt at a different one.

Waiving Kamara with an injury designation is procedure, not commentary. He was carted off, the club named a knee and has offered nothing past the body part, and this piece supplies no timeline because nobody has reported one.

The club's own tables are a day behind#

Counted table by table in a browser at 3:01 p.m. Sunday, the roster page read 88 active, three on active/PUP, two on reserve/injured and one on reserve/left squad. Apple and Kamara were still in the active table. Neither Herbert nor Leo appeared anywhere. The transaction log still ended on August 1.

Two things fall out of that read. The first is the count above: 88 plus three is 91 names, less Alarcon's exemption, is 90. The second is smaller and worth keeping: the PUP list is down to Guerendo, George Kittle and Mykel Williams, which means Alfred Collins has come off it and is in the active group at 95. Camp opened with four men there.

Anybody counting this roster off the club's own tables on a given afternoon is counting yesterday. The release runs ahead of both.

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Sources. The 49ers' official release, August 2, 1:25 p.m., for all four transactions and for the Herbert and Leo biographies and career figures. The club's roster page and transaction log, counted table by table in a browser at 3:01 p.m. the same afternoon. Aaron Wilson's report of the Alarcon exemption via Oliver G. at Niners Wire, April 28, 2026, for the exemption and its treatment. Marc Adams, 49ers Webzone, August 2, 12:37 and 1:00 p.m., for the Okoronkwo, Carter and Thomas workouts, reported off the league transaction wire. Saturday's practice details come from this site's published camp notebook of August 1, which sources them to Nick Wagoner of ESPN, Jennifer Lee Chan of NBC Sports Bay Area and Tim Kawakami of the SF Standard. The July 30 tracker column referenced above is this site's own. This site had nobody at practice and nobody in the building.