Osa Odighizuwa ranks 108th against the run. Tampa Bay has the 2nd.
A'Shawn Robinson is 31, plays half the snaps on a one-year deal and would cost the 49ers about $2 million in cap after the Nov. 10 deadline. The two deadline trades in five years that match his profile went for a sixth and for a second plus a fifth.
Against the run, PFF's grades put Osa Odighizuwa 108th of 113 interior defensive linemen with at least 80 snaps through Week 4. Gracen Halton is 101st. They are the two interior linemen the 49ers play most.
A'Shawn Robinson is 2nd. He plays for Tampa Bay, he is 31, and his contract ends in March.
Tampa Bay beat Dallas 24-16 on Thursday night and is 1-4. From 1999 through 2025, 145 teams started 1-4, and 10 of them made the playoffs. That is about 7 percent. Since the field grew to 14 teams in 2020, the count is 2 of 35. A 1-4 team can still be a buyer. Most of them miss the playoffs, though, and a club that expects to miss is the one that moves a 31-year-old on an expiring deal.
Where the help is coming, and where it is not#
The 49ers' pass rush has injuries, and most of them are ending.
- Nick Bosa (knee and calf) did not practice Wednesday or Thursday and is not on injured reserve. Kyle Shanahan said he does not think Bosa is far from playing.
- Mykel Williams returned to practice from a torn ACL on Sept. 30. The club has until Oct. 21 to activate him, and Shanahan said Thursday he should be good to go for Seattle.
- Sam Okuayinonu went on injured reserve with a broken foot on Sept. 4. He has now missed the four games that injured reserve requires.
- Romello Height had hand surgery on Sept. 22, played 37 snaps against Denver and practiced fully on Thursday.
Inside, the list reads differently. Alfred Collins was ruled out of the opener with a torn patellar tendon, and Shanahan has said his season is over. C.J. West went on injured reserve on Sept. 23 with a bone chip in his knee that needed surgery. Shanahan said it is not season-ending, but he gave no date, and four games on the list make Week 7 the earliest West can play. James Thompson Jr., the third, has a high-ankle sprain and did not practice this week. Five defensive tackles made the 53. On Sept. 23, Shanahan's count was two healthy.
So the edge gets bodies back over the next two weeks. The interior gets Thompson back when his ankle allows, and West at some point after Week 7.
What Robinson does, and what he does not#
Robinson ranks 1st of 113 interior linemen on PFF's overall grade and 2nd against the run. As a pass rusher he ranks 78th. Both halves matter. He is a run defender who plays half the snaps: 122 of Tampa Bay's defensive snaps, 50.5 percent, through four games, by the league's snap counts.
That is the job the 49ers need done. Odighizuwa ranks 32nd as a pass rusher, which is where his value is, and he has played 72 percent of the snaps. A Robinson trade does not replace him. It takes early-down run snaps off him and off Halton, a 22-year-old rookie who ranks 101st against the run.
The confound is the sample. Four games and 122 snaps are not much, and grades over a month move. Last season PFF ranked Robinson 43rd of 105 interior linemen overall. The fair reading is that he is a solid run defender who has had an excellent month, not the best interior lineman in football. The same caution applies to the 49ers' two, though a month at 108th and 101st is a long way to drift by accident.
The contract, which is most of the case#
Robinson signed for one year and $10 million with Tampa Bay this spring. Over The Cap lists $0 in dead money to Tampa Bay if he is traded. That is the first reason his price should be low: moving him costs the Buccaneers nothing on their cap, and he leaves them in March either way.
The second reason is how little the 49ers would carry. His 2026 money is a $3.15 million base salary, a $6 million roster bonus and up to $850,000 in per-game bonuses. A trade on Nov. 10 falls after Week 9, with nine of 18 weekly paychecks left, so the 49ers would owe half the base: $1,575,000. The per-game bonus works out to $50,000 a game, and the 49ers have nine games left after Nov. 10, which adds up to $450,000. That is about $2 million. Over The Cap has the 49ers $41.4 million under the cap.
That figure assumes Tampa Bay has already paid the roster bonus, which Over The Cap does not date. If it has not, the 49ers' share rises by $6 million and still fits.
He also leaves nothing behind for 2027. The cap math ends when his contract does.
What the comps say the price is#
From 2021 through 2025, two trades in the weeks before the deadline involved an interior defensive lineman aged 29 or older whose contract ended that season. n = 2. Three more interior-line trades in the same windows miss one test, and they are in the table because they bound the price from below.
Older interior linemen on short deals have moved for Day 3 picks, with one exception
Interior defensive line trades in the final weeks before the deadline, 2021 to 2025. The top two meet all three tests: interior lineman, 29 or older, contract ending that season. The bottom three miss one.
| Player | Age | Teams | Date | Picks exchanged |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Johnathan Hankins | 30 | Raiders to Cowboys | Oct. 25, 2022 | Dallas got Hankins and a 2024 seventh; Las Vegas got a 2023 sixth |
| Leonard Williams | 29 | Giants to Seahawks | Oct. 30, 2023 | New York got a 2024 second and a 2025 fifth, and kept paying most of his salary |
| Roy Robertson-Harris | 31 | Jaguars to Seahawks | Oct. 14, 2024 | Jacksonville got a 2026 sixth (contract ran past that season) |
| Khalil Davis | 28 | Texans to 49ers | Nov. 5, 2024 | Houston got a 2026 seventh (under 29) |
| Kentavius Street | 27 | Eagles to Falcons | Oct. 30, 2023 | Atlanta got Street and a 2025 seventh; Philadelphia got a 2024 sixth (under 29) |
Read the top two rows first. Hankins was 30 and on a one-year deal, and he moved in a swap of late picks. Williams was 29, a starter in the last year of a $63 million contract, and Seattle paid a second while the Giants kept most of his salary. Robinson is 31, on a one-year deal, plays half the snaps and ranks 78th of 113 as a pass rusher. He is Hankins with a better month.
The bottom three rows say the same thing from another angle. Two were younger and one was on a longer deal, and all three went for a sixth or a seventh.
So the table puts Robinson's price on Day 3. A fifth-round pick is in that range and at the generous end of it. A fourth would beat every deal in the table except Williams's, and that one involved a far more expensive contract and a seller who kept paying it. Two comps are two comps. They describe the market's habits, not a rule.
Vita Vea is the harder deal#
Vea is the Tampa Bay lineman on Matt Barrows's list in The Athletic. PFF ranks him 55th of 113. The bigger obstacle is his contract. He signed an extension in August that runs through 2027, and Over The Cap shows $28.2 million in dead money for Tampa Bay if he is traded: $8.5 million on this year's cap and the rest on next year's. The acquiring club would also take on a fully guaranteed $23 million salary for 2027. A team selling at 1-4 does not usually pay that much to move a player.
The roster spot#
The 53 is full. Activating Williams already takes one move. A trade takes a second. The roster page offers one obvious candidate: Thompson, a defensive tackle on the active roster who has not practiced this week. Moving him to injured reserve would open the spot and cost him at least four more games.
Jauan Jennings is not the receiver answer#
Receiver is the other thin room, and Jauan Jennings is the name fans will suggest. He signed with Minnesota in May for one year and $8 million, according to Over The Cap, with up to $5 million more in incentives.
The case against a reunion is partly speed and partly the last two seasons. Jennings ran a 4.72-second 40-yard dash at the 2020 combine, 44th of the 45 receivers who ran. Next Gen Stats measured his average separation from the nearest defender at 2.49 yards in 2024, 112th of 129 qualifying receivers, and 2.23 yards in 2025, 113th of 120. His separation sat near the bottom of the league in both seasons. What changed is the production around it. He averaged 65.0 receiving yards a game in 2024 and 42.9 in 2025, on 7.5 and 6.0 targets a game across 15 games each year.
In Minnesota he has played three games, been targeted four times and caught two passes for 9 yards. That is too few to measure decline. Week 4 is the sharper number. Justin Jefferson did not play, Jennings took 95 percent of the offensive snaps, and he was targeted once while Jordan Addison drew six.
The numbers support part of the case against him. He was always slow, his yards a game fell by about a third in 2025, and given nearly every snap in Week 4 he drew one target. Whether that means he is finished cannot be settled from four targets. It does mean he is not a fix.
The call#
The 49ers acquire an interior defensive lineman by trade before the deadline at 4 p.m. Eastern on Nov. 10. The case for it is the injury list: one defensive tackle out for the season, one with no return date and one week to week. A 1-4 seller has the right player on the right contract. John Lynch said Thursday the club is "always in active mode." The case against is that interior trades are rare. From 2021 through 2025, six interior linemen moved in the weeks before the deadline, league-wide, about one a year, and the 49ers could decide that Bosa, Williams and Okuayinonu coming back is enough addition for one deadline.
Revisit on Nov. 10.
PFF ranks are through Week 4, among the 113 interior defensive linemen with at least 80 snaps, as published on the 49ers trade targets page; ranks only, no grades. Snap counts and the 1-4 base rate come from the league's game and snap data via nflverse, 1999 through 2025, regular season, counting a team's first five games and excluding starts with a tie. The comps cover the 2021 to 2025 deadline windows, include only trades with a team release or a contemporaneous report naming the picks, and treat a player as interior by his role, not his listing. The weak spot is n = 2, and a trade with no draft picks in it would be the easiest kind to miss. The $2 million figure assumes the roster bonus was paid before the deadline.
Sources: PFF, through Week 4, via the 49ers trade targets page at /49ers/trade-targets/. Over The Cap: A'Shawn Robinson, Vita Vea and Jauan Jennings contract pages and the 2026 salary cap space table. nflverse: games, snap counts, weekly player stats, Next Gen Stats receiving and 2020 combine files. NFL.com: 2026-27 league calendar; 2022 trade deadline tracker. ESPN, Oct. 30, 2023, on the Leonard Williams trade. CBS Sports, Oct. 25, 2022, on the Hankins trade. 49ers.com, Nov. 5, 2024, on the Khalil Davis trade. Atlanta Falcons release, Oct. 30, 2023, on the Kentavius Street trade. The Everett Herald, Oct. 15, 2024, on the Robertson-Harris trade. 49ers.com transactions log and roster page. 49ers injury reports, Oct. 7 and 8. Kyle Shanahan via David Bonilla, 49ers Webzone, Sept. 23 and Oct. 8; Shanahan via Cam Inman, Bay Area News Group, Sept. 23. John Lynch on KNBR, Oct. 8. Matt Barrows, The Athletic. Vikings release, May 7, 2026. ESPN box score, Tampa Bay at Dallas, Oct. 8.
