Nick Bosa Injury Update: 49ers Star Cleared to Play in the NFL’s First Australia Game
Nick Bosa is playing. The 49ers are not being coy about it, and that alone should worry the rest of the NFC.
San Francisco defensive coordinator Raheem Morris told reporters in Australia on Tuesday that Bosa is going, and made a point of not dressing it up. Whatever you want to say, Morris said, Bosa will be there: “We’re not hiding that.”
That is a remarkable sentence coming out of a Kyle Shanahan operation, where injury information usually gets guarded like nuclear codes.
The comeback took eleven months
Bosa tore his right ACL in Week 3 of the 2025 season. He has been rehabbing ever since, and he returned to practice last Wednesday, taking part in 11-on-11 drills for the first time since the injury. Days later he was on a plane to Melbourne.
That is a fast turnaround from first full practice to first game, and it says the 49ers medical staff has been sitting on a green light for a while. Teams do not put a player through 11-on-11 for the first time and then fly him 7,800 miles unless they already know the answer.
What San Francisco gets back
The 49ers defense without Bosa last season was a unit that generated pressure by scheme and hoped. With him, it is a front that forces offensive coordinators to build entire game plans around one player. Losing him in Week 3 essentially decided San Francisco’s season before October.
George Kittle is also trending in the right direction, which means the 49ers could open the year with their two most important non-quarterback players available. That was not a realistic expectation in June.
A game unlike any other opener
This is the first regular-season NFL game ever played in Australia. The 49ers and Rams meet at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, a venue that seats roughly 100,000 people and has never hosted anything like this.
The two teams prepared for the trip in completely opposite ways. San Francisco flew in more than a full week early to let players adjust to the time change. The Rams waited until Thursday, landing roughly 24 hours before kickoff. One of those approaches is going to look very smart by Sunday and the other is going to get picked apart on every talk show in America.
For Bosa, none of that matters much. He has been waiting eleven months to hit a quarterback who is not wearing a red non-contact jersey. Matthew Stafford is the first one available.
The Rams should be nervous.
Sources
- https://www.nfl.com/news/niners-de-nick-bosa-to-play-week-1-vs-rams-te-george-kittle-trending-in-right-direction
- https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/nick-bosa-set-return-49ers-042900750.html
- https://www.nbcsportsbayarea.com/nfl/san-francisco-49ers/nick-bosa-george-kittle-injury-status/1961408/
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
