DeForest Buckner Is a 49er Again: Colts Trade Their Star Back to San Francisco for a Fourth-Round Pick

You can go home again. It just helps when the house is on fire.

The Indianapolis Colts are trading defensive tackle DeForest Buckner back to the San Francisco 49ers for a 2027 fourth-round pick, ESPN's Adam Schefter and NFL Network's Ian Rapoport reported Tuesday, with The Ringer's Tom Pelissero reporting the fourth-round return. “Trade: Colts are sending three-time Pro-Bowl DT DeForest Buckner back to the 49ers, the team that made him a 2016 first-round pick before dealing him to Indianapolis in 2020,” Schefter wrote. One honesty note up front, because it matters: as of publication, neither team has announced the deal. This is a trade reported by the three most plugged-in reporters in the sport — not yet a trade confirmed by the clubs — and this story will be updated the moment that changes.

The receipt

Start with the circle, because the circle is the story. San Francisco took Buckner out of Oregon with the No. 7 overall pick in the 2016 draft. He gave the 49ers four seasons, a Super Bowl run, and 28.5 sacks — and then, in March 2020, the 49ers traded him to Indianapolis for the No. 13 overall pick, and the Colts handed him a four-year, $84 million extension on the way in.

Indianapolis got its money's worth. Buckner was a First-Team All-Pro in his first season there — 9.5 sacks from the interior — made three Pro Bowls as a Colt, and leaves with 75.5 career sacks. On Tuesday, six and a half years after paying a first-rounder for him, the Colts sent him back to where he started for a fourth. The 49ers sold high, watched somebody else pay the prime years' salary, and bought the reunion at a discount. Front offices almost never get to run a trade in both directions and win it twice.

Why the price was a fourth

Because the calendar said so. Buckner is 32 and in the final year of his contract — San Francisco takes on the $7.944 million remaining on the deal, per Pelissero, and he reaches free agency for the first time in his career this spring. Read that number carefully, because there are two in this story: $7.944 million is the cash left on the contract. His cap hit for 2026 is $26.6 million (per Over the Cap), and Indianapolis still carries $10.8 million of it in dead money even after the trade. Indianapolis's alternative was worse: as Schefter noted, if Buckner had simply walked in free agency, the most the Colts could have received was a fifth-round compensatory pick — and a 2028 one at that. A 2027 fourth, now, beats a 2028 fifth, later. That is the whole negotiation.

And he is not a nostalgia act. In seven games this season Buckner has 4 sacks, 31 tackles, eight quarterback hits, three passes defended and a fumble recovery, with 20 pressures on Pro Football Focus's count — a top-tier interior rusher's line, produced for a team going nowhere.

One afternoon in Indianapolis

Buckner was not even Tuesday's first domino. Hours earlier, the Colts sent eight-time Pro Bowl guard Quenton Nelson to the Seattle Seahawks for a 2027 third-round pick and a 2028 fifth. Two franchise cornerstones, both on expiring deals, both gone in one afternoon — to two teams in the same division, who happen to be racing each other.

The context in Indianapolis is grim and entirely public: the Colts are 2-5, they fired general manager Chris Ballard last week, and interim GM Ed Dodds is running the selloff with the Nov. 10 trade deadline still two weeks out. League reporting has already named running back Jonathan Taylor as the next Colt contenders covet. Nothing about Tuesday suggests Indianapolis is finished.

What San Francisco is actually getting

The 49ers lead the NFC West at 6-1 — and their defensive front has been the one ordinary thing about them: 15 sacks as a team, No. 20 in the league, with defensive tackles CJ West and Alfred Collins hurt and Nick Bosa only due back from a calf strain after this week's bye. Buckner walks into the exact hole in the roster, next to Osa Odighizuwa, on a defense built to play January football.

The locker room needs no introduction. George Kittle — Buckner's teammate from 2017 through the Super Bowl LIV season — celebrated the news on X as soon as it broke. Buckner was a captain in Indianapolis, the four-star patch on his chest in every photo. He is that in San Francisco's building too, starting now.

The Indy goodbye

For all the frustration of the last two weeks — and Buckner had stopped hiding it — there was no bitterness in the exit. “I have no regrets or anything about coming to Indy,” he told the Indianapolis Star. “I love Indy, my family was able to grow here, we built a lot of great relationships here in the building and outside. I have no regrets.” This is a man who played through a dislocated hand joint, a torn elbow ligament, a bad ankle, a bad back and a herniated disc in his neck that needed surgery and made him question, for the first time, whether his career was over. Seven seasons, 95 games, everything he had. Indianapolis is not trading away a problem. It is trading away the best player of its era, because the era is over and everybody in the building knows it.

What happens next

The 49ers are on their Week 8 bye, which buys Buckner two weeks to learn the defense he used to anchor. San Francisco comes off the bye at home — the 49ers host the Las Vegas Raiders at Levi's Stadium on Nov. 8 — so his first game back in red and gold is a homecoming game with the division lead on the line. Previously will update this story when the teams announce the trade, and the Stats Hub pages for Buckner, the Colts and the 49ers move with it.

Status as of publication: trade reported by ESPN's Adam Schefter, NFL Network's Ian Rapoport and The Ringer's Tom Pelissero (terms: a 2027 fourth-round pick to Indianapolis). No official announcement from the 49ers or Colts yet.