A new 49ers postgame fixture: Trent Williams and Nick Bosa’s locker room summits
Daniel Johnston
Published Apr 06, 2026
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — After wins, music typically blares in the 49ers’ locker room. After losses, it can be as quiet as a library. But there’s always an undercurrent of unwinding energy, a sense that the mayhem of the preceding 3½ hours is neatly relaxing into a settled place.
Call it postgame processing, and note that a big share of it always happens at Trent Williams’ locker, when fellow superstar Nick Bosa — whose stall is on the other side of the room — pulls up a chair facing the left tackle.
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Bosa’s fellow defensive lineman, Kerry Hyder Jr., is locker neighbors with Williams. Those two chat frequently throughout the week, so postgame discussions naturally follow on weekends.
When the 25-year-old Bosa ambles up and sits down next to the 34-year-old Williams and Hyder after every game, a conversation triangle forms.
“It just started this season,” Bosa recently said. “I’d be walking over to the cold tubs and Trent would be sitting there with Kerry, who’s his locker mate, and I would just sit down and see what he had to say about the game and talk about my performance and whatever I did.”
As one would expect, conversation topics of the star-powered summits at Williams’ locker vary based on the day’s result.
After the 49ers’ most recent loss, which came about 2½ months ago on Oct. 23 against the Chiefs, Bosa told Williams that it was time for the team to return to the drawing board. Following Sunday’s win over the Cardinals, Williams, Bosa and Hyder caught up on scores around the NFL. They exchanged words with a couple passers-by, defensive lineman Charles Omenihu and tight end Tyler Kroft, who had butted their heads into the triangle.
“And we were pretty much congratulating Bosa on winning Defensive Player of the Year,” Hyder said with a chuckle on Sunday. The award won’t be presented until next month, but Bosa is the heavy favorite to win it. “We honestly think he should be more in the MVP race. He’s won a couple games at the end of the game. There’s those moments that really say he’s the most valuable player.”
And those are some of the moments that Williams and Bosa reflect on from the preceding game as they talk. The conversation often takes a technical turn, as pass rushers — Omenihu, Samson Ebukam, Arik Armstead and Kevin Givens join the weekly meeting from time to time — take the opportunity to pick the brain of the game’s best left tackle.
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“Trent is just a wealth of knowledge in general,” Hyder said. “Being around Trent every day, he always tells you something that you can work with or how you can rush someone. You’ve got some film to look at, you can bring it over to him.
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“So we have Nick, talking about him being Defensive Player of the Year, and I’m always calling Trent a Hall of Famer. It’s just cool being around these guys, man. It’s not often that you’ve got probably the best to ever play and the best player in the league right now in the same locker room. It’s a wealth of knowledge.
“And the great thing that’s really crazy is that Bosa can be so amazing at what he does, he still takes in so much information. Whether it’s from Trent or from me or from anyone else, he still asks a bunch of questions. So he’s always learning, always trying to figure out how to sack the quarterback and stuff like that. The thing about being around here, you can’t help but soak it in like a sponge.”
Rewind back to the summer of 2020. That’s when Bosa and Williams, who had joined the 49ers from Washington via trade earlier that year, first locked horns on the practice field during training camp.
Epic battles ensued between the two players and eventually gave birth to the postgame ritual at Williams’ locker.
“Coming here from Washington, I just wasn’t used to losing one-on-ones,” Williams said. “Just my whole career, I was 98th and 99th percentile as far as losing on one-on-one reps. But then against Nick during that camp, we’d always go two in a row and we would always split.
“For me as a competitor, it just really kept me up at night. It was like, ‘Damn, I don’t know why I can’t get him twice in a row!'”
Said Bosa: “Right when we started, it was pretty competitive, trying to beat each other every time. It was from the jump that we really just worked together well. Didn’t do anything after the whistle or anything like that. It was always a lot of respect. I’m lucky to have the best to work with.”
Williams’ sleepless nights led him to take an extraordinary measure. He began watching tape of Bosa, even though they obviously weren’t slated to play against each other in a game.
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“You don’t scout your teammates all too often,” Williams said with a laugh. “Just looking at the little nuances that he does, things that I thought I was nuanced in and he made nuances or counters to my little things that basically only I did, I learned real quick that he’s not one of those guys that you can use the same thing on. As much as he switches it up, you’ve got to switch it up and keep him guessing.
“As soon as he has a tell on you and he knows what your plan is, he can chop it up. He’s going to beat you and he can beat you often. I started switching it up to face him and ultimately it transferred over to when I faced everyone else, because me having to be at this level all the time when he was across from me made it to that’s just who I was when I stepped on the field.”
It’s relevant to note that Williams’ reputation was nearly mythical when he joined the 49ers in 2020. That season, the team had also acquired tight end Jordan Reed, who’d played with Williams for six seasons in Washington.
“(Reed) said, ‘I’ve never seen Trent lose a one-on-one,'” 49ers tight end George Kittle said last week. “And then he saw Nick win a couple. When you see Nick and Trent go up against each other, you see Trent turn it up another notch. That’s a game day for him.”
His mind stimulated by competition, Williams sought out Bosa after practices and games. Their chats began during walks off the field.
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“As the talks got longer, we just started to sit down here,” Williams said, pointing at his locker — conveniently located on the route from Bosa’s stall to the cold tubs. “It’d be like a central spot. But we’ve been helping each other as far as what he sees in me and what I see in him, we’ve been doing that since Day 1, 2020 — as soon as I came in.”
Kittle doesn’t partake in the Williams-Bosa postgame summits — “I like to give them their space because they’re both football minds,” he said — but he does find other times to absorb knowledge from his star teammate.
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“We fly on the plane and Williams sits next to me and I lean over and listen to his approach about how he blocks guys,” Kittle said. “The amount of tape he watches on every defensive end he’s going to go against — he watches hundreds of cutups on every rusher that he’s had in the last several years.
“Trent does such a good job of his research and study, just listening to him talk football — that’s almost more fluent to him than English.”
Kittle’s locker mate is star running back Christian McCaffrey, whose insertion into the 49ers’ starting lineup following a trade from Carolina has coincided with the team’s 10-game winning streak and a remarkable uptick in offensive efficiency.
So there’s a sizable load of football knowledge tucked away in that far corner of the room, too. But there’s no organized postgame meeting there, at least yet.
McCaffrey, heading in the direction of the cold tub following the 49ers’ win over the Commanders last month, was looking for a place to unload some postgame thoughts.
“I saw ’em talking over there,” McCaffrey said of Williams and Bosa. “So I just went and joined ’em. It’s a de-compression state. That’s what I would describe it as. Reflecting on the game and looking forward to next week as well.”
The discussion again also featured a technical aspect. And it’s worth noting that this attention to detail has been one of the key ingredients to the 49ers’ surge entering Saturday’s playoff opener against Seattle.
McCaffrey has melded particularly well with Williams and the 49ers’ other O-linemen to revive the team’s run game. The 49ers’ rushing attack, which ranked No. 26 in defense-adjusted value over average (DVOA) before McCaffrey’s arrival, has ranked No. 3 in DVOA since then.
“Everybody here buys into the run game and making everything work and feeding off of each other,” McCaffrey said. “It’s pretty special. Everybody’s job is so critical. Me having to press it and hit at the right gap for the timing of the play, understanding who’s moving, who’s pulling, who’s not and what we’re trying to accomplish with the run game — there’s a lot of mental volume that comes with that. That’s so much more than just physically beating your guy.”
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Cerebral mastery of football. Perhaps that underscores the significance of the cross-positional discussions that are so prevalent in the 49ers’ locker room.
“It’s such a unique sport,” McCaffrey said. “It’s really 22 different sports playing football. I’ve never really backpedaled in my life. I don’t know what it’s like to play DB. But I know what it’s like to go against them. Same with linebacker and offense and the defensive side of the ball. It’s all so different, and yet we’re all in this locker room trying to accomplish the same thing.”
McCaffrey described an aura of perfectionism in the 49ers’ locker room, and he attributed it to veteran leadership that brews in those conversations between players such as Williams and Bosa.
“When you have players like that in your locker room, there’s no shortage of knowledge, no shortage of wisdom that even me in my sixth year, I’m always trying to get,” McCaffrey said. “It’s a fun locker room to be a part of because of that. So many guys that push each other, even if you’re playing different positions, you can always pick someone’s brain and learn something new.
“And I notice that there’s a huge sense of urgency to be really good on tape, and not just win the game, but to execute your assignment at a high level — win or lose — and I think that’s such a unique thing in this locker room. It’s not just about the wins and losses. We want to play well. We want to win well and go out there and make the tape look good.”
It’s that drive to raise playing standards that initially forged the relationship between Bosa and Williams on the practice field. In the other, each player had finally found a worthy match — physically, cerebrally and technically.
And that’s why the postgame meeting is now routine in the 49ers’ locker room, even when the team is on the road. After a win over the Raiders in Las Vegas earlier this month, Bosa was again at Williams’ locker. He had trekked over from the half of the room featuring the defense’s stalls and taken a seat next to the left tackle.
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“We’re talking about our performances specifically,” Bosa said. “If I saw Trent get beat one time, which is rare, I’ll say, ‘So what did (the pass rusher) do there?’ It’s very humble. We’re not afraid to say we had a bad game or whatever it is. Not that he ever has bad games. But it’s just good conversation.”
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And to Williams, who has been a Pro Bowler in all three of his seasons with the 49ers, it’s much more than that. When he joined the team in 2020, Williams — then 32 years old — hadn’t played in a game since 2018. He’d missed the 2019 season after undergoing a surgical procedure to remove a cancerous growth from his head. There were questions about how Williams would re-acclimate to the NFL.
That’s when he first started battling with Bosa on the practice field.
“And I can say that facing Nick,” Williams said, “helped revitalize my career. It’s the truth.”
That message was relayed to Bosa. The soft-spoken pass rusher was beginning to walk out of the room, but he paused upon hearing how important he has been to Williams.
Bosa began slowly nodding.
“That’s pretty cool,” he said, a smile cracking across his face.
(Top photo of Trent Williams and Nick Bosa: Michael Zagaris / San Francisco 49ers / Getty Images)
