Eddy Pineiro is no longer headed toward free agency next week: the San Francisco 49ers have agreed to a four-year deal that keeps their kicker in place after a season that began with uncertainty and ended with a reworked special-teams pecking order.
What exactly did the 49ers and Eddy Pineiro agree to?
The 49ers have reached an agreement to re-sign free agent kicker Eddy Piñeiro to a four-year deal. The contract provides what one account described as job stability, with the total value communicated by Eddy Pineiro’s agents at $17 million, including $10 million guaranteed.
The agreement comes after Eddy Pineiro was scheduled to hit free agency next week but instead will remain in San Francisco. The move locks in a kicker who arrived before Week 1 last season and quickly became central to the 49ers’ weekly calculus on fourth downs, long attempts, and end-of-half situations.
How did Eddy Pineiro turn a “wobbly” unit into a team strength?
The 49ers began last season hoping Jake Moody—described as a former third-round pick who had struggled in 2024—would settle in. The early returns went the other way. Moody opened the season shakily, missing two field goals in a narrow win over the Seattle Seahawks. The team then waived Moody and signed Piñeiro off the street.
Piñeiro’s first kick as a 49er, a point-after attempt in New Orleans, sailed wide right. The miss could have reinforced the anxiety that had surrounded the position. Instead, Piñeiro stabilized quickly: he was sharp on field goals in that game and for the rest of the season.
His only field-goal miss the rest of the way came on a 60-yard attempt in Indianapolis that struck dead center on the crossbar. The description of the kick underscored how narrowly it failed and how close it came to a rare threshold in franchise history.
What the numbers say—and what they do not
On field goals, Eddy Pineiro finished the season 28 of 29 overall, including 6 of 7 from 50 yards or longer. His longest was a 59-yarder late in the fourth quarter of a Week 5 overtime win over the Los Angeles Rams, described as the second-longest field goal in 49ers history. The only longer one referenced is David Akers’ 63-yarder in Green Bay in 2012.
Extra points were less clean. Piñeiro missed four of his 38 extra point attempts. The split is part of what makes the extension notable: the 49ers are committing long-term despite an area that still produced visible blemishes in routine scoring situations, even as the broader field-goal performance was characterized as transforming the unit into a strength.
Verified fact: The contract terms relayed by Eddy Pineiro’s agents include a total value of $17 million and $10 million guaranteed; his field-goal line was 28-of-29 with a long of 59; his 50-plus performance was 6-of-7; he missed four of 38 extra points.
Informed analysis: The package of results—near-automatic field goals, plus a non-trivial number of extra-point misses—suggests the team is prioritizing the reliability of high-leverage field goals while accepting that “automatic” remains an imperfect standard even for a kicker retained on a four-year commitment.
Who benefits, who is implicated, and what this signals next
The immediate beneficiary is the 49ers’ special teams operation, which now returns a kicker under a multi-year agreement after a season that began with open competition and ended with a new hierarchy. Eddy Pineiro benefits from guaranteed money and a longer runway in a role that can change quickly with a few misses.
The agreement also sits alongside other special-teams roster work: the 49ers have already signed long snapper Jon Weeks, 40, to a one-year extension, and they are working on a deal with punter Thomas Morstead, who turns 40 on Sunday and is also a free agent.
One detail within the season’s narrative is hard to ignore: the 49ers moved on from Jake Moody during the season after early misses, then entrusted Eddy Piñeiro with the job after signing him off the street. That sequence implies a willingness to make quick, high-impact decisions at specialist positions when performance swings early, even as this new agreement indicates a desire for continuity going forward.
Eddy Pineiro’s deal, on its face, is about keeping a productive kicker. Underneath, it highlights how quickly the “plan” at kicker can change, and how aggressively the 49ers are now trying to prevent that churn from repeating.
Eddy Pineiro now enters the next phase in San Francisco with a four-year agreement in hand, a season of near-flawless field-goal production behind him, and a clear message embedded in the timeline: the 49ers want stability at kicker—and they are paying for it.
