General manager John Lynch left his hotel room at the Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay in Florida on Saturday night to meet with FOX announcer Ronde Barber, who called Sunday's game between the San Francisco 49ers and Buccaneers. Lynch never leaves his phone behind. This time, however, was the exception. He left the phone in his room to charge and returned to 15 messages.
"Right away, you go, 'Oh no. Something's wrong,'" Lynch said during a Tuesday-night KNBR interview on the "Tolbert & Lund" show.
Something was indeed wrong. Those messages were letting Lynch know that his second-year linebacker and a former first-round draft pick, Rueben Foster, was yet again in trouble with the law. Foster was arrested at 9:10 p.m. ET on suspicion of domestic violence for the second time in a 10-month span.
Fewer than nine hours later and four hours before Sunday's kickoff, the 49ers announced that Foster would be released.
"Right away, it became fairly clear to us what needed to happen," Lynch said.
The 49ers made the call based on Foster's track record of making bad decisions and the resources the team had already placed in the young linebacker.
"We tried our best to [put structure around him], and it did not work out," Lynch continued. "I own that. I do personally. I put my belief in him and that hurts for me because I believed in the kid. I wanted him to be successful. I really thought I could help him in that. I thought the resources we put into him could help him. Hopefully, we did in some form or fashion.
"Hopefully, what was alleged to happen, never happened. I don't know that. We'll see."
Foster was officially waived on Monday afternoon and surprisingly claimed by the Washington Redskins on Tuesday. Lynch compared the love the team has for Foster to loving someone within your own family. You may be angry or disappointed in them, but you still love them. That made the decision to part ways with Foster even more difficult.
"Most of all, we had to move on," Lynch said. "He was claimed today with Washington, and we wish him well."
Lynch said he wasn't necessarily surprised that another NFL team claimed Foster, especially given what he knew about teams like Washington who had done a lot of pre-draft work on the linebacker.
You can listen to the entire conversation with Lynch below.