Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer listed the 49ers as a potential suitor for free agent safety Jessie Bates:
I’d be surprised if Cincinnati’s Jessie Bates doesn’t cash in, and he may even scrape up against what Minkah Fitzpatrick and Derwin James got last year. In almost every case, you have to ask with free agents why their current teams are letting them go. In this one, it’s easy—the Bengals don’t want to lose him, but they have a lot of mouths to feed. So their loss could be the gain of a team such as Chicago, Cleveland or San Francisco.