The 49ers didn’t just add a defensive tackle this offseason - they changed the shape of the interior line.
That’s the real takeaway from Jeremy Fowler’s ESPN ranking of the NFL’s best defensive tackles entering 2026. San Francisco’s Osa Odighizuwa didn’t make the top 10, but he still drew votes from league executives, scouts, and coaches, landing among the 19 players mentioned. In a league-wide check on who commands respect at the position, that matters.
And for the 49ers, it matters even more because of what they were working with a year ago.
Last season’s defensive tackle rotation featured Kalia Davis, Alfred Collins, Jordan Elliott, and CJ West. Collins and West are still in the picture, but Davis and Elliott are gone.
Davis logged 492 snaps for San Francisco in 2025, while Elliott played 463. That’s a big chunk of work to replace, and it adds up fast.
Odighizuwa looks built to absorb a lot of it right away. He played 692 snaps last season, so he brings the kind of workload the 49ers needed when they set out to reshape the group. Instead of asking Collins and West to shoulder everything, San Francisco can spread the load more naturally.
The departures also tell the story. Davis signed with the Cleveland Browns, where he won’t be starting ahead of Mason Graham or Maliek Collins and will have to fight for depth snaps.
Elliott, meanwhile, followed Robert Saleh to the Tennessee Titans. Solomon Thomas did the same, and the two will compete for work next to Jeffery Simmons.
That leaves the 49ers in a very different spot than they were in 2025. They’re taking snaps that belonged to a bottom-of-the-roster tackle and a fringe starter and replacing them with a player who got recognized as one of the league’s better interior defenders. That’s the kind of offseason move they were after.
Gracen Halton, a fourth-round rookie, is also in the mix.
There are still plenty of questions for San Francisco heading into 2026, but the interior defensive line isn’t one of them. That group should be better than it was last season.
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