SANTA CLARA — The one that got away this week from the 49ers? He was never theirs.
Joey Bosa will not be joining younger brother Nick on the 49ers’ defensive line for a long-imagined family reunion.
Cast free for the first time after nine years down the coast on the Chargers, Joey Bosa agreed Tuesday night to a one-year, $12.6 million deal
On one hand (the dominant hand), the 49ers need an all-around defensive end to bracket the line’s other side opposite Nick Bosa, who’s their most expensive asset, until and assuming Brock Purdy surpasses him with a contract extension in this cost-conscious offseason.
Could Joey Bosa have been that complementary threat the 49ers have lacked since Dee Ford in Nick Bosa’s 2019 rookie season? He has 72 sacks and 156 quarterback hits since 2016, but an injury-laden career has seen him miss 21 games over the past three seasons.
Which brings us to the 49ers’ other hand: General manager John Lynch preached two weeks ago that the 49ers must go younger and be more restrained with their finances.
That’s translated to an emotionally painful start of the league year today. The collateral damage: Seven players agreed Monday to free agent deals elsewhere; fullback Kyle Juszczyk and defensive end Leonard Floyd got released Tuesday; and, today’s moves will include Deebo Samuel’s trade to Washington and the releases of defensive tackles Javon Hargrave and Maliek Collins.
Among the defensive ends available after this past week’s burst of deals: DeMarcus Lawrence, Azeez Ojulari, Dante Fowler Jr., Josh Uche, K’Lavon Chaisson, and former 49ers Charles Omenihu and Clelin Ferrell.
For now, it looks like a roster in shambles rather than in contention for Super Bowl 60 at Levi’s Stadium on Feb. 8.
Joey Bosa has appeared in only four playoff games, winning his first with the 2018 Chargers at Baltimore but losing the next three, including a 32-13 wild-card loss at Houston this past January in which he had a sack.
He’s attended some of his younger brother’s NFL playoff games, a 12-game compilation that includes two Super Bowl defeats.
“Him on the other side, it might break the NFL,” Nick Bosa said in 2023 on Richard Sherman’s podcast about bookending a defensive line with Joey.
The Bosas’ bond has seen them routinely muse about playing together. That often came up amid offseason training in the gym Joey Bosa built in their native Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Big brother also has been a regular presence at 49ers’ playoff games in support along of his sibling, along with their parents, Cheryl and John, the latter of whom was a 1987 first-round pick by the Miami Dolphins.
Cheryl was so enamored with her sons joining forces that she posted an Instagram story looking to start a petition for that family reunion “in the bay.”
“They’re cool, calm, chilling by themselves,” 49ers tight end George Kittle said of the Bosa brothers after a 2021 joint practice in training camp in Costa Mesa. “Then you put them on the football field and they’re violent, aggressive, making play after play and are relentless. They don’t turn off until they’re on the sideline, then they’re back to their normal selves. It’s very strange and I love it.”
The Bosa brothers last were teammates at St. Thomas Aquinas High-Fort Lauderdale in 2012, when Nick arrived as a freshman and Joey played his senior season; they won the Class 7A State Championship at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando.
They just missed overlapping at Ohio State in respective three-year tenures there before entering the NFL. Joey was the No. 3 overall draft pick in 2016 by the then-San Diego Chargers; Nick was the No. 2 pick in 2019. Both won NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year honors.
While sequestered in Florida during the 2020 pandemic, the Bosa brothers worked out together and discussed a potential union. But where? That dream was put on hold once Joey Bosa agreed to a contract extension (five years, $135 million) during the 2020 training camp with the Chargers.
“Hopefully, maybe, later in our careers get together, but we’re focused on our own paths right now,” Nick Bosa said in August 2020, three years before he himself landed the richest contract ever for a NFL defender five years, $170 million).
Last offseason, thoughts rekindled of a Bosa-Bosa union, until the elder brother restructured his contract and returned to the Chargers for essentially $15 million last year. “It was fun to think about,” Nick Bosa said last summer. “He wanted to stick with the team and be a part of them hopefully turning it around.”
And now Joey Bosa is heading to Buffalo, hoping to get them over the AFC hump and into their first Lombardi Trophy presentation.
