San Francisco 49ers: Who Jarryd Hayne Would Have to Beat Out to Make the Roster
San Francisco 49ers running back, kick returner and former Australian rugby league superstar Jarryd Hayne is all that’s been advertised and more so.
One week after rushing five times for 63 yards, returning a kick for 33 yards and two punts for 13 and 11 yards, Hayne had a second star turn against the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday night. Hayne had 84 yards' worth of punt returns, with all three being as long or longer than the 49ers’ longest punt return of 2014. He added in eight more carries for 54 yards to boot.
In preseason, Hayne is averaging 9.0 yards per carry, 21.6 yards per punt return and 33.0 yards per kickoff return. Yes, this is mostly against backups and camp bodies, but it’s still a tremendous performance from a player who had literally never played an organized game of football before.
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Thus, Haynemania has hit San Francisco fairly solidly.
The question seems to be not whether Hayne is good enough to make the roster—even if Bruce Ellington is healthy enough to retake the returner job, which is far from guaranteed, Hayne seems to be worth a spot as a core special teamer. The question is: How can the 49ers keep him on the roster?
It seems unlikely that they can stash him on the practice squad. Hayne’s preseason performance has been good enough that some other team would take a chance on him if the 49ers tried to slip him through cuts. That means he’d need to take up a spot on the 53-man roster.
At the start of the season last year, the 49ers had four running backs on their main roster: Frank Gore, Carlos Hyde, LaMichael James and Bruce Miller. By the end of the season, they had reached five players, as James left and Alfonso Smith and Phillip Tanner filled out the bottom of the roster, but for most of the year they ran with just three.
Six running backs are not entirely out of the question. The Kansas City Chiefs, New Orleans Saints and San Diego Chargers both started last season with six active running backs on the roster. However, the Chiefs included De’Anthony Thomas, who moved to wide receiver almost immediately, and the Saints included two fullbacks rather than an extra running back. A much more realistic number would be five backs.
Could the 49ers fit Hayne in among those five running backs? They currently have eight running backs on the active roster. Who would they have to let go instead of Hayne?
There are three ways players can save their spots on a final roster: They can be priced into it based on their contracts, be drafted recently or can prove themselves over the previous couple seasons.
Let’s take a look at who on the roster has a spot already locked up at running back.
Salary Considerations
Three running backs seem to have their spots guaranteed thanks to their contract situations.
Carlos Hyde is still on his rookie deal, but all of his salary is guaranteed this season. There’s also the prorated amount of his signing bonus and the $50,000 workout bonus already paid to him, as noted by Over the Cap. That means that every single dollar of his 2015 salary is either guaranteed or paid to him already, giving the 49ers no salary-cap relief whatsoever by cutting him. He’s not going anywhere.
Similarly, Mike Davis is also on his rookie deal. While a cut this late in the season wouldn’t precisely devastate the 49ers financially—they’d just be on the hook for his nearly $470,000 signing bonus—that’s a big hit to take for a player scheduled to make the league minimum for each of his first four seasons, according to Over the Cap. That’d just be a foolish move.
Finally, there’s Bruce Miller. Last season, Miller signed a three-year contract extension, with $2.31 million guaranteed. Because he was on the roster as of April 1, $819,000 of this year’s salary was guaranteed, as was the remainder of his $1.786 million signing bonus. Even with a cut this late, the 49ers would still put over $1.2 million in dead money on their cap this year and a similar number next season, which is just not financially sound.
So Hyde's, Davis' and Miller’s contracts sew up three slots before Hayne can even enter the picture.
Recent Draft Choices
Even if Hyde and Davis didn’t have very player-friendly contracts at this point, the fact that the 49ers picked them highly in the past two years would keep them on the team. Hyde, of course, was the 57th-overall pick of the 2014 draft, with the 49ers opting for him over players like Jack Mewhort, Jarvis Landry or Justin Britt. You don’t dump second-round picks after just one season.
You also don’t use fourth-round picks like Davis on players who won’t be part of the team going forward. They opted to take him over a wide receiver like Florida State’s Rashad Greene, an inside linebacker like Minnesota’s Damien Wilson or an inside lineman like Miami’s Jon Feliciano, so he’d better at least make the roster.
On-Field Success
As excited as 49ers fans are about Hyde, his 83 carries last season would hardly lock someone into a roster slot. If he was an undrafted free agent rather than a recent second-round pick, he’d have to do more to earn a roster slot.
Bruce Miller showed his same run-blocking fortitude last season, as well as catching 18 passes for 189 yards and a couple of touchdowns. The 49ers are one of the few teams that still regularly use a fullback, and Miller is one of the best in the game. Even if he hadn’t signed a new contract last season, he’d lock up his roster spot to continue to facilitate San Francisco’s power run game.
That also covers Reggie Bush. The 49ers didn’t bring Bush in simply to kick his tires; they brought him in because when healthy last season, he was still an effective player.
His 550 yards from scrimmage were his lowest total since 2010, but that can be chalked up in large part to a series of ankle injuries. When he was healthy early on in the season, Bush was averaging 60 yards from scrimmage per game, which is fine from San Francisco’s point of view. He’s the best pass-catching back the 49ers have as well. All of this locks him into a roster spot, despite his lack of appearances so far this preseason.
So that’s four players—Hyde, Davis, Miller and Bush—locked into roster slots. The 49ers have the depth to go for five, so who’s left to compete with Jarryd Hayne?
The Competition
Trey Millard is the backup fullback, and it’s highly unlikely that they’d keep two fullbacks on the active roster for game days. Millard is a much better candidate for the practice squad or emergency call-up, should Miller go down with an injury. Hayne would seem to be ahead of him.
Kendall Gaskins spent last season on the practice squad and hasn’t exploded yet this preseason. He had 10 carries for 20 yards against Dallas, a week after gaining 12 yards on five carries against Houston. That’s not exactly lighting up the field, though maybe he'll bounce back to the practice squad himself.
That leaves one man for Hayne to beat out, and he's a tough one: Kendall Hunter.
Hunter’s 473 yards as a rookie in 2011 are the most by any non-Frank Gore running back since Kevan Barlow. He’s one of three players, along with Gore and Colin Kaepernick, to rush for more than 1,000 yards over the last decade of franchise history, running along at a very solid 4.59-yard-per-carry clip. The 49ers like him so much that they signed him to a one-year extension in November, despite the fact that he tore his ACL and missed the entire 2014 season.
The question then is: Do they go with the more solid Hunter, assuming his ACL will be able to handle a regular workload this season? Or do they go with Hayne, the special teams and preseason sensation?
It’s not an easy decision at all, but it’s one the team might have to make when the time comes to cut down to 53 men.
With how Hayne and Mike Davis have been playing, I think the 49ers can gamble on the upside of the rugby superstar. Plus, Hayne contributes on special teams, both as a return man and on coverage—a skill set which should not be overlooked. Hunter had 53 special teams snaps in 2013, according to Niners Nation, which isn’t nothing but hardly counts him as a regular contributor.
Hunter only recently returned to practice with the full team, so maybe he can put together a preseason performance that reminds people why he’s been a key backup to this point in his career. As it stands now, however, he looks like the odd man out.
Bryan Knowles is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report, covering the San Francisco 49ers. Follow him @BryKno on twitter.
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