‘Hulk’ Valdez stock rising with hot 49ers

By Ramon Scott
Updated: October 21, 2026

Sebastian Valdez hits Jayden Daniels on Monday night.

2026 EAST COUNTY ALUMNI

Unranked at Monte Vista and undrafted out of college, Sebastian Valdez turned down the Steelers, waited out the practice squad — and now he’s sacking quarterbacks for the unbeaten 49ers

By RAMON SCOTT
EastCountySports.com

SANTA CLARA — They call him “The Hulk” in the San Francisco 49ers’ locker room, and on Monday night, a national television audience found out why the nickname isn’t the only thing Sebastian Valdez earned the hard way.

Joe Buck told the story on the Monday Night Football broadcast: late last season, stuck on the 49ers’ practice squad as an undrafted rookie with no snaps to his name, Valdez got an offer from the Pittsburgh Steelers — leave, and step straight onto an active NFL roster. The Monte Vista High product said no.

“I believe in this team,” Valdez said. “I believe in the system that we have. I believe in everything the 49ers strive for. And I know the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. So, yeah, I made the decision to stay.”

It was the latest in a career full of bets on himself, and this one has already paid out. On Oct. 11 at Lumen Field, wearing No. 55, Valdez beat Seattle guard Grey Zabel and dropped Sam Darnold for a 5-yard loss — the first sack of his NFL career, in a 32-29 win. Monday night against Washington, he followed it with a tackle for loss and a quarterback hit on Jayden Daniels in a 23-17 victory that kept San Francisco unbeaten, and the national write-ups have started using a new phrase next to his name: stock rising.

None of it was supposed to happen. Start with his recruiting profile, because there barely was one.

Unranked, unoffered, undaunted

Valdez was born in Spring Valley and came out of Monte Vista — the Monarchs, in the heart of East County — unranked by every major recruiting service, with no reported scholarship offers. The one school that came calling was Montana State, an FCS program in Bozeman, about as far from the San Diego spotlight as a California kid can land.

Bozeman turned out to be the making of him. He played in 13 games as a freshman in 2021, then exploded in 2022: 44 tackles, 10 tackles for loss and seven sacks, first-team All-Big Sky, sophomore All-American honors, and Montana State’s Ron Warzeka Defensive Lineman of the Year award. He followed it with a second-team All-Big Sky season in 2023, racking up 8.5 tackles for loss, and finished his Bobcat career ranked among the FCS leaders in quarterback pressures from the defensive tackle spot two years running.

Another Monte Vista Monarch, Blake Schmidt, was anchoring the same Montana State line at nose tackle — two Spring Valley kids holding down the middle in the Big Sky cold.

The gamble in Seattle — the other Seattle

With one year of eligibility left, Valdez bet on himself again. He transferred to Washington, enrolling on Jan. 3 and traveling with the Huskies to Houston for the national championship game, watching from the sideline in sweats with his name on the back of a jersey he hadn’t yet earned.

Then the ground moved. Kalen DeBoer, the head coach he’d signed to play for, left for Alabama. Valdez had been on campus about two weeks. He stayed anyway, won over Jedd Fisch’s incoming staff, and called it “probably the best decision I ever made.” He started all 13 games for Washington in 2024, posting 49 tackles and earning honorable mention All-Big Ten — an FCS transfer starting every Saturday in the Big Ten.

At Washington’s pro day, he benched 225 pounds 34 times — a number that would have topped the NFL Combine — and ran the 40 in under five seconds at better than 300 pounds. There’s the Hulk nickname in one sentence.

The NFL still passed. All seven rounds of the 2025 draft came and went without his name. San Francisco signed him as an undrafted free agent, and he spent his entire rookie season on the practice squad — elevated twice, never once taking a regular-season snap, even as the Steelers’ offer sat in front of him. When 2026 cutdown day came, he was waived again, and stashed on the practice squad again.

The payoff

This fall, injuries tore through the 49ers’ defensive front, and the door Valdez refused to walk out of finally swung open. He was promoted to the 53-man roster, debuted in Week 3 against Arizona with three tackles and one of the defense’s highest Pro Football Focus grades, and added two pressures on Denver’s Bo Nix a week later. Kyle Shanahan: “He’s been waiting for this opportunity for two years now, and we were pretty confident that he would take advantage of it when he got it. He hasn’t disappointed.”

Then came Seattle, and the neatest bit of symmetry in the whole story. The guard Valdez beat for his first NFL sack, Grey Zabel, was a 2025 first-round draft pick — and the same lineman he’d lined up against in the 2023 FCS playoffs, when Zabel’s North Dakota State team edged Montana State 35-34 in Bozeman. Three years later, on a bigger stage, the unranked kid from Spring Valley won the rematch. Through four games this season he has nine tackles and that one very large sack.

San Francisco is unbeaten, Nick Bosa is nearing a return, and the snaps will only get harder to keep. That’s the life Valdez chose — repeatedly, when easier ones were on the table.

But somewhere in Spring Valley there’s a lesson with cleats on: the road from Monte Vista to an NFL sack ran through Bozeman, a coaching change in Seattle, seven rounds of silence on draft weekend, two straight years of practice-squad Sundays, and a phone call from Pittsburgh he had the nerve to decline.

“It’s a dream come true,” Valdez said. “It’s super exciting, and I’m super, super pumped up to get ready every week.”

The kid nobody ranked has a nickname now, and an NFL sack to go with it. The Hulk, it turns out, was worth the wait.