Ricky Pearsall will not play a single snap for the San Francisco 49ers in 2026. The wide receiver is headed for season-ending surgery on his right knee, general manager John Lynch confirmed Saturday at Levi’s Stadium, closing the book on a training camp that unraveled within days. Pearsall was placed on injured reserve shortly after the news broke.
The issue traces back to a posterior cruciate ligament injury Pearsall first dealt with during the 2025 season. He tried to play through it, aggravated the knee more than once down the stretch, and the swelling returned almost as soon as he stepped onto the practice field for 2026 training camp in Santa Clara. According to NFL.com, Lynch said doctors ultimately agreed surgery was the only path forward, with a recovery window of six to 12 months.
“He’s gutted. We’re gutted,” Lynch told reporters, summing up a locker room that had circled Pearsall as a breakout candidate heading into his third pro season.
San Francisco moved fast to cover the hole. A day before Lynch’s announcement, the team re-signed Deebo Samuel to a one-year contract, and Samuel inherited Pearsall’s open spot on the 53-man roster. Paired with Mike Evans, who arrived in March, plus Christian Kirk and rookie De’Zhaun Stribling, the 49ers now have a receiver room that looks almost nothing like the one that broke camp last summer. It is a familiar scramble around the league this preseason, where crowded receiver rooms have become the norm rather than the exception, even as other franchises spend August locking up their own building blocks with deals like Jalen Carter’s extension in Philadelphia.
Pearsall’s 49ers career has been defined by bad luck almost from the moment San Francisco drafted him 31st overall out of Florida in 2024. He was shot in the chest during an attempted robbery near Union Square that August, an injury that pushed his NFL debut back to mid-October of his rookie year. He has still managed 67 catches for 928 yards and three touchdowns across two injury-shortened seasons, including a stretch in 2025 when he ranked third in the NFL in receiving yards before the Week 4 knee injury first flared up. He played through it for a while, the knee flared again in Week 15, an ankle sprain piled on shortly after, and the same knee gave out once more in Week 17. By the time the 2025 season ended, Pearsall had been limited to 10 total games including the playoffs.
That pattern is exactly what worried the 49ers’ medical staff once camp opened. A wide receiver who cannot string together healthy weeks in season is one thing. A player who cannot make it past a handful of practices before the same joint swells up again is a different problem entirely, and it is the reason Lynch and the team’s doctors stopped trying to manage the injury and opted for surgery instead.
The absences add up to more than the highlight numbers suggest. Pearsall has already missed 31 of the 49ers’ 51 games since he was drafted in 2024, a rate of roughly 61 percent, and that total already accounts for all 17 games he is projected to miss in 2026. Pearsall has yet to finish a full NFL season on the active roster.
None of that changes what the 49ers need from their receiver group right now. Deebo Samuel knows the offense from his previous stint in San Francisco, Evans gives Brock Purdy a proven red zone target, and Kirk provides the possession element Pearsall was expected to fill. Whether that group can replicate what Pearsall flashed in short bursts, including that three-week run near the top of the NFL’s receiving charts, will say plenty about how the 49ers’ offense looks without him.
For Pearsall, the calendar now points toward 2027. The six-to-12-month recovery window doctors outlined could have him back on the field for offseason work as early as next spring, or as late as next summer’s training camp. Whether the knee holds up under a full workload again is the question nobody in Santa Clara can answer yet.
