How the 49ers’ deal with Christian McCaffrey brought them so close to winning the Super Bowl in 2024

How the 49ers’ deal with Christian McCaffrey brought them so close to winning the Super Bowl in 2024

To get Christian McCaffrey from the Carolina Panthers, the San Francisco 49ers paid a very low price. They also have one of the best backs for running of this generation.

McCaffrey’s contract may be the best non-rookie deal in the NFL this season. It won’t be bad in the future either, which is another reason for the trade.

To put it another way: It’s higher for the Buffalo Bills than for the 49ers when it comes to cap hits this season for Nyheim Hines.

McCaffrey, who is in the running for MVP, has a cap hit of only $3.424 million. Spotrac says that this cap hit ranks 18th among the running backs for the 2023 season, just behind Hines as well as Clyde Edwards-Helaire.

Still pretty good for a player who had 21 touchdowns and 2,023 yards from scrimmage, which was the most in the NFL.

What did the 49ers do to get a veteran quarterback who is a candidate for MVP on a deal that has the 14th-highest cap hit on his team?

Part of the reason for this is the NFL’s wage cap rules, which let the team make a good change without putting their future at risk.

Last season, the 49ers traded for McCaffrey. This was two years after the Panthers signed him to a four-year, $64 million deal. A $21.5 million landing bonus was part of that Panthers deal.

That had to be taken into account by the Panthers when they traded for him because the signing bonus goes up quickly when a team drops or trades a player.

For this season, Carolina’s cap hit for McCaffrey was $18.35 million, which is about a fifth of San Francisco’s cap hit for their top running back.

This season, McCaffrey had a total cap hit of $21,776,250. However, 84.3% of that hit was put on a team that he didn’t even play for.

With McCaffrey, the 49ers were able to do a pretty standard restructure without adding too much money to the salary cap for future years.

In 2023, McCaffrey turned $10.72 million of his starting pay into a signing bonus. This made the contract last two years longer than it had been before.

The signing bonus is spread out throughout the whole NFL contract. NBC Sports Bay Area says that freed up $8.576 million in cap space for the 49ers.

“It just gives us some room,” 49ers team president John Lynch told NBC Sports Bay Area in April of last year. “We were pushed when it came time to sign our rookies.”

“We wanted some freedom, and it made sense to do that.” Simple conversion: Christian is going to be here. We did it, and we’re grateful to Christian for agreeing to do it. Good for him. That’s good for us.

McCaffrey’s cap hits will go up to more than $14 million over the next two years, and the 49ers will have to worry about a dead cap hit of a little over $6 million when the void years come around. But overall, it’s a great deal for them this season.

It makes sense to give one of the best non-quarterbacks in football a $14 million cap hit. McCaffrey will make $12 million a year in 2025 and $11.8 million a year in 2024.

Early bettors on Super Bowl LVIII are on the Chiefs, and that hasn’t changed in the few days since the game was announced. BetMGM’s moneyline odds for the Chiefs are completely unfair.

These are the two most common ways to bet on a football game: the point spread along with the moneyline. The money line is just a bet on what team will win, with odds that have been changed.

The San Francisco 49ers have -130 moneyline odds at BetMGM, which means you have to bet $130 to win $100. The Kansas City Chiefs have +110 odds, which means you have to bet $100 to win $110.

There are some things to keep in mind about that huge gap. Most bets on the Super Bowl are placed in the days before the game. The bets placed in the initial few hours make up a small part of all the bets that will be placed on the game.

As the game draws near, there might be a shift toward the 49ers. However, the early money is headed to Kansas City.

The Chiefs are a two-point underdog against the spread, and as of Tuesday, more than three-quarters of the money put on the spread was against them.