Former Broncos general manager Neal Dahlen has died, the team announced. He was 85.
Dahlen has seven Super Bowl rings, which is tied with Tom Brady for the second-most in history behind only Bill Belichick. He held the record alone for the most Super Bowl titles for an individual until Belichick and the Patriots won Super Bowl LI in 2017.
Dahlen worked for the 49ers from 1979-96, winning five Super Bowls. He served as the Broncos’ director of player personnel during their first two Super Bowl titles.
He was with the Broncos from 1996-2003, holding the General Manager title from 1999-2001, and he finished his career as the Broncos’ director of football administration.
His teams were 7-0 in Super Bowls.
“I attribute my good fortune to three key elements: Joe Montana, Steve Young and John Elway,” Dahlen told Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times in 2018.
Dahlen, a California native, was a collegiate quarterback and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from San Jose State.
49ers Clips
The 49ers are keeping one of their impending free agents from hitting the open market.
The team announced that they have signed offensive lineman Nick Zakelj to a new deal. It is a one-year extension with no other terms announced.
Zakelj was a 2022 sixth-round pick out of Fordham. He appeared in nine games in his first two seasons before landing on injured reserve with a torn biceps and then played in all 17 games during the 2024 season. Zakelj was on the practice squad in 2025, but was elevated to appear in three games.
The 49ers have Spencer Burford, Ben Bartsch and Matt Hennessy on track for free agency on their offensive line.
The 49ers will be leaving the country for two of their 17 games during the 2026 regular season.
The team announced on Wednesday that they will be the designated home team for a game in Mexico City this fall. The date and opponent for the game at Estadio Banorte have not been announced at this point.
Mexico has not hosted an NFL game since the 2022 season. The 49ers beat the Cardinals 38-10 in that game and the same two teams also took part in the NFL’s first-ever Mexico City game during the 2005 season.
The announcement comes after the NFL announced that the 49ers will be facing the Rams in the league’s first Australian game. The trips to Melbourne and Mexico City join road games in Atlanta and New Jersey for what will be a well-traveled 49ers team this year.
The 49ers are hiring veteran defensive backs coach Jerry Gray, Matt Zenitz of CBS Sports reports.
Gray was assistant head coach/defense for Atlanta for the past three years.
It is unclear what his role will be with the 49ers, but he reunites with Raheem Morris. Morris, the former head coach of the Falcons, is now the 49ers’ defensive coordinator.
Gray was a four-time Pro Bowl defensive back in nine seasons as a player, including seven years with the Rams. He began his coaching career immediately after his playing career.
He has nearly 30 years of NFL coaching experience, working at Tennessee, Buffalo, Washington Seattle, Minnesota, Green Bay and Atlanta. Gray was defensive coordinator with the Titans (2011-13) and Bills (2001-05).
The Seahawks have found a new offensive coordinator who is likely to keep the same scheme.
According to multiple reports, Seattle is hiring San Francisco tight ends coach Brian Fleury for the role.
Fleury had been with the 49ers since 2019, beginning his time with the club as a defensive quality control coach. He moved over to offense in 2020, serving a quality control coach for the unit before being promoted to tight ends coach in 2022.
San Francisco added run game coordinator to his title in 2025.
Fleury is replacing Klint Kubiak, who was hired as Raiders head coach after Super Bowl LX. Kubiak previously served as San Francisco’s passing game coordinator in 2023, working alongside Fleury and head coach Kyle Shanahan.
Fleury also has at least some level of familiarity with quarterback Sam Darnold, who spent the 2023 season as the 49ers’ backup quarterback.
The Seattle Seahawks will consider a division rival for their offensive coordinator opening.
San Francisco 49ers tight ends coach Brian Fleury is interviewing today for the Seahawks offensive coordinator job, according to Adam Schefter of ESPN.
The Seahawks need a new offensive coordinator after Klint Kubiak left to become head coach of the Raiders. Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald runs the defense, so offensive coordinator is the most important assistant on his staff.
Fleury is a longtime member of Kyle Shanahan’s 49ers staff. Fleury and Shanahan originally worked together on the Browns’ stasff in 2014, and Shanahan hired Fleury in 2019, originally as a defensive quality control coach before moving him to offensive quality control in 2020, promoting him to tight ends coach in 2022 and then adding run game coordinator to his title last year.
Macdonald has plenty of experience coaching against the 49ers’ offense, and he was impressed enough that he’s now considering adding a coach from that staff to his team.
49ers wide receiver Kendrick Bourne signed a one-year contract to return to the team after being cut by the Patriots last year and he’d like his second stint with the team to last a little longer.
Bourne caught 37 passes for 551 yards in 16 games for the Niners in 2025 and said on his YouTube channel that he’s hoping to remain with the team rather than move elsewhere as a free agent.
“The year went great,” Bourne said. “Hitting free agency this year, it’s gonna be fun. I want to go back to San Fran, so that’s the plan, but it’s all got to make sense,”
Earlier this month, Bourne touched on the electrical substation near the 49ers’ facility. Bourne wondered why grass at the 49ers’ practice facility turns brown while other fields further away remain green and, via 49ersWebzone.com, called himself a “conspiracy theorist” when it came to the possible impact the substation has on the health of 49ers players.
That substation was around during Bourne’s first stint with the 49ers and it didn’t keep him from returning to the team last year. It’s also not keeping him from sharing his desire to stick around, so any concerns would not seem to be major factors in decisions about his football future.
Now that the 2025 NFL season has ended, attention has turned to the start of the next season.
And with the 49ers and Rams due to stage a Week 1 game in Melbourne, some interesting permutations are percolating.
John Ourand of Puck, who recently reported that the 49ers-Rams game in Melbourne will happen as part of the NFL’s opening weekend, now reports Rams-49ers will happen on Wednesday, September 9, or Thursday, September 10.
It could be 49ers-Rams on Wednesday, with the Seahawks’ home opener landing on Thursday. That also could flip, with the Seahawks playing on Wednesday and the Australia game happening on Thursday.
Either way, NBC will televise the Seahawks game. A to-be-determined streamer will broadcast 49ers-Rams.
It still makes a ton of sense, in our view, to play 49ers-Rams on Sunday, September 6. That would give both teams the most time possible to recover from the travel and time difference to get ready for Week 2, and beyond. Currently, however, it appears that Rams-49ers will be a midweek game — and possibly the first game of the 2026 season.
The Seahawks, if the NFL concocts its schedule in the usual way, will open the 2026 season with a home game on Thursday, September 10. And with both the 49ers and Rams reportedly set to play Week 1 in Melbourne, two viable options to get the short straw in Seattle will be out of the mix.
But there are still plenty of good matchups, given a 2026 home schedule for the Seahawks that is chock full of competitive teams.
Beyond the NFC West rivals, the Seahawks will host the Chiefs, Chargers, Bears, Cowboys, Giants, and Patriots. Every one of those games has appeal.
The Chargers and Giants would introduce the wrinkle of Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald squaring off against one of his former bosses, Jim and John Harbaugh. The Chiefs have the Patrick Mahomes (and maybe Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift) angle. The Cowboys are always a major draw. The Bears will be one of the “hot” teams for 2026.
And while a Super Bowl rematch may not have much sizzle given what happened on Sunday, it would still be a Super Bowl rematch.
Even a game against the Cardinals could be compelling, since they have a new coach and presumably will have a new quarterback. (Seattle and Arizona played an overtime game in Week 4 of the 2025 season.)
It nevertheless remains possible that Whoever vs. Seahawks won’t be the first game of the season. 49ers-Rams may need to be played before the opening Thursday in order to reduce the significant travel/jet-lag burden.
Still, if the existing approach holds, it’ll be Seattle against someone as they hang their latest banner on the first Thursday night of the season. One of the many decisions the NFL will need to make about the 2026 schedule will entail selecting the opponent for what should be a fairly significant game.
The question of whether the proximity of an electrical substation to the 49ers’ practice facility continues to drive conversation. Because 49ers players continue to give the conspiracy theory oxygen.
49ers tight end George Kittle recently boiled it all down to one simple request: Let’s make sure it’s not an issue.
Kittle gave extensive comments about the situation in an interview with Jordan Rose of Complex.
“One of my teammates put it really good, Kyle Juszczyk, our fullback,” Kittle said. “And he said, ‘As a professional athlete, you’re always trying to get one percent better.’ Like, ‘Is this ice tub, is this rehab-recovery thing, is this red-light therapy, does it make me one-percent better?’ Because then you can stack all those up and you’re like, ‘Hey, you’re three-percent better than the next guy because you’re doing all this stuff.’ If something’s affecting like negatively 0.25 percent, you’d want to know about it. Like whether it’s this type of cleat is hurting me, this type of shoulder pads is, like, increas[ing] my risk to get hurt. You’d probably change that.
“So I think all we’re saying is, as players, it’s like, we would just like to look into it to make sure it’s not something. That’s what I would just appreciate. Like, ‘Hey, this isn’t gonna affect you guys.’ And then if they come out and they do some research, like, ‘No, you guys are good,’ then I don’t think we’ll think about it.”
That’s a fair and reasonable request and the 49ers have said they’ll look into it. Unfortunatey, we live in a post-truth dystopia in which self-serving opinion trumps fact.
Thus, regardless of what the research shows, someone won’t believe it. And Kittle has something that could justify someone/anyone to reject the research as unreliable.
“Now, one thing that messes me up with it — this is tough,” Kittle said. “My rookie season, there used to be trees in between the electrical substation and our practice facility, and there’s a fence there, too. And above the fence, all the trees had no leaves on them, year-round. . . . All dead. There’s a couple bunches of leaves every once in a while, and it was like that — no one notices it until you point it out to people. Like, I didn’t point it out to coach [Kyle] Shanahan until like 2021.
“Like, that was pointed out to me my rookie season, I was like, ‘That’s kind of weird, yeah. It is what it is.’ But then this year the NFL came in and cut them all down. So they’re not there anymore, so no one can see them. So it’s only us vets that know that that was the truth. I don’t think anyone’s talking about that yet, but that one messed me up. I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s no leaves on these trees. Why?’”
Kittle then tried to make light of the situation, after lighting the fuse on the dead-tree theory.
“My argument for it is this,” Kittle said. “Like, Fred Warner, he practices there and trains there year-round, and he’s had one injury his entire career. So it’s like — now, did he just evolve and he absorbed the radiation? I don’t know. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. But it’s just like, let’s just figure out if it’s actually harming the players or not, and hopefully it’s not. It’s easy.”
It’s easy, as long as the outcome of the team’s examination of the issue is accepted. No matter what the 49ers conclude, someone will dispute it. And someone who has an offer to join the team in free agency will choose to take the same offer from a team with a practice facility that presents no risk whatsoever, credible or not, from the proximity of an electrical substation.
