Four Signings in a Week: Okoronkwo, Irwin, Deguara, Hodge, and a Roster Held Together With Tape

Every one of these moves is defensible. Every one of them is a guy I would have on my team. And the fact that we needed all four of them inside seven days of training camp is the single most 49ers thing that has happened all year.

Ogbo Okoronkwo: the one I actually like

Start with the best of them. Okoronkwo is 31, he has 17 sacks and 31 tackles for loss over 81 games, and he won Super Bowl LVI playing for Raheem Morris with the Rams. Fifth-round pick out of Oklahoma who has just kept surviving, which in the edge rusher business is not nothing.

The catch, and there is always a catch: he played exactly one game last season for Philadelphia before he tore a triceps and went on injured reserve. So we are signing a 31-year-old pass rusher coming off a torn triceps. In August. Because we needed one.

Still, this is the rare depth signing with an actual ceiling. A rotational edge who has produced in this league and who knows exactly what Morris wants is worth having, and if the guy is even 80 percent of what he was, that is a real football player on the roster for nothing.

Trenton Irwin: the Stanford kid comes home

This is the one that got me. Irwin is from Valencia, played four years at Stanford, put up 152 catches and 1,738 yards on The Farm, went undrafted, and has spent basically his entire pro life in Cincinnati catching passes as the guy nobody talks about. Forty-one games, 46 catches, 601 yards, five touchdowns.

He is not a star and I am not going to pretend he is. What he is, is a 30-year-old who runs the right route on the right depth on the right down, which is the single most underrated ability in Kyle Shanahan's offense. That system eats up guys who freelance and it loves guys who are exactly where the quarterback expects them.

And selfishly, I just like it. Bay Area college kid, one-year deal, comes back to play for the local team at 30. That is a good story and we do not get enough of those.

Josiah Deguara: the guy nobody will notice until he saves a drive

Deguara was a third-round pick by Green Bay in 2020, which felt like a reach at the time and mostly was. Six years, 77 games, 53 catches, 471 yards, three touchdowns. Packers, then Jacksonville, then Arizona, now here.

He is a blocking tight end and a special teams body. He is going to be on the field for twelve snaps a game, one of them is going to spring a McCaffrey run for eighteen yards, and nobody watching will know his name. That is the job. That is a perfectly fine thing to have on the roster.

KhaDarel Hodge, and then the part where you count the injuries

We already wrote about Hodge, so the short version: 31 years old, eight years in the league, three catches last season, and one of the best gunners in football. He made the Pro Bowl on special teams in 2024. Another Morris guy from Atlanta. Good signing, no notes.

Now put all four on the table at once and look at what it actually says.

Pearsall is out for the season. Jauan Jennings has been in and out with a calf. Christian Kirk missed most of a week with a calf. Deebo had to be re-signed on a one-year deal a week ago and that was already the emergency plan. To make room for these guys we waived a corner and waived/injured a tight end we had just brought in. That is not a team adding pieces. That is a team plugging holes as fast as they open.

Here is the thing that has me chewing on the couch

Every August I get told this is the most talented roster in football. And every August, before a single meaningful snap, the training staff is busier than the coaching staff, and by Thanksgiving we are asking a 31-year-old special teams gunner and a guy off the Cardinals to play real snaps in real games.

Look at the ages. Okoronkwo 31, Hodge 31, Irwin 30. These are not building blocks. These are veterans on one-year deals who are here because they are healthy and available and know somebody on the staff. That is what a contender does when it has decided its problem is bodies, not talent.

And maybe it is. Maybe the talent really is there and this is just a rough camp and by September everybody is upright and I look like an idiot for writing this. I would genuinely love that. I have been waiting since 1994 to stop writing columns like this one.

So: welcome, all four of you

Okoronkwo gives Morris a rusher he trusts. Irwin gives Purdy a receiver who will be exactly where he is supposed to be. Deguara gives the run game a body. Hodge gives the punt team a Pro Bowler. Four useful, unglamorous, low-cost football players, and the front office deserves credit for going and getting them instead of standing around insisting the room was fine.

But I am not celebrating a depth chart. The only thing that decides this season is whether the actual starters are on the field in January. Keep Purdy upright. Keep the receivers healthy. Everything else is tape and prayer.

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