NFL Player Aldon Smith Spoke About Struggling, Having ‘Better Days’ in Video Posted Just Before His Death at 36
Former NFL linebacker Aldon Smith died at age 36 on June 13, 2026. Days before his death, he appeared on the Laced Up podcast and said he was struggling with a lifelong personal issue but felt things were beginning to improve. The San Francisco 49ers announced his passing and noted his contributions on the field.
- ▪Aldon Smith died on June 13, 2026 at the age of 36.
- ▪In a recent podcast interview, Smith said he was dealing with a long‑standing personal issue and was struggling to accept how it was playing out.
- ▪He expressed gratitude and said that recent events were starting to pay off despite a tough week.
- ▪Smith described his return to San Francisco as bittersweet, noting a warm reception but also feeling unready to be back.
- ▪The San Francisco 49ers released a statement announcing his sudden and tragic passing.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Yahoo Sports |
| Canonical URL | https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/nfl-player-aldon-smith-spoke-234349779.html |
| Publication time | Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:43:49 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-15T00:07:33.547Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-15T00:07:33.547Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | e8unUoS9CiTJ · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Yahoo Sports.
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