Nick Bosa was in uniform Sunday for the 49ers’ first training-camp practice, roughly 10 months removed from the ACL tear that ended his 2025 season in Week 3. He did not open camp on the physically unable to perform list. By all accounts from the field in Santa Clara, he moved like a man who’d never been hurt.
Left tackle Trent Williams, who has lined up across from Bosa in practice for years and knows the difference between a player favoring a knee and one who isn’t, delivered the review that turned heads.
“I see him every day,” Williams said, via Cam Inman of the Bay Area News Group. “I can’t tell he had an injury and came back from anything. Most people with an injury that catastrophic, you can see it with something, like with atrophy in leg. Bosa looks better than he did before he got hurt.”
No atrophy. No hitch. No favoring. When a 365-pound left tackle who has blocked every elite edge rusher in the league tells you a guy looks better than he did before his knee exploded, you listen. Williams isn’t a hype man. He’s a film-room guy, and the film doesn’t lie.
This is Bosa’s third ACL recovery. He tore his right ACL for the second time last September, and the fact that he’s been through this rehab twice before — once at Ohio State, once as a rookie in 2019 — gave him a blueprint most players don’t have. You don’t rehab a knee three times without learning a few things about your own body that no trainer can teach you.
General manager John Lynch told reporters Saturday the club plans to ease Bosa into action, which is the smart play. No reason to run him out there in pads on Day 1 and ask him to prove something. The opener isn’t until Sept. 10, and it’s in Melbourne, Australia — a long flight and a real game, not a scrimmage. You want that leg right by then, not tested in late July.
Early video from Sunday’s session showed Bosa going through warmups and defensive line drills without any visible limitation. Matt Barrows of The Athletic and Inman both posted footage of Bosa moving through individual periods. ESPN’s Nick Wagoner shared additional practice clips alongside Williams’s assessment.
These are shorts-and-helmets practices. No contact. The real tests come later — how the knee responds the morning after a full session, and then what happens when the pads come on and the reps go live. A man can look like a million dollars in a jog-through and still have that knee bark at him the first time he plants and drives against a 320-pound tackle.
But what Williams described isn’t a guy surviving a drill. He described a guy who rebuilt the leg stronger than it was. Three ACL tears, and the third time back he looks better than the original. That’s not normal. That’s a man who treated rehab like a season, and the early returns say the work took.
The 49ers need Bosa the way a ranch needs its best hand — every day, all season, in the toughest stretches. If Williams is reading the tape right, they’ll have him at full strength when it counts.
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