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49ers C Pat Elflein Injures Calf and Leaves Practice

Kyle Shanahan was chatting with general manager John Lynch on the field when a trainer walked over presumably to deliver the news. It's unclear when Elflein will return.

Grant Cohn

NFL Arizona Cardinals center Pat Elflein
NFL Arizona Cardinals center Pat Elflein / Joel Angel Juarez/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORK
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SANTA CLARA -- Grand opening, grand closing.

The 49ers announced on Friday morning that they signed veteran center Pat Elflein. A few hours later, Elflein limped off the practice field with an injury.

"We think he pulled his calf," head coach Kyle Shanahan said after practice. "He did it in individual (drills). I didn't get to see it or anything, but I was told that. So we think it was a calf."

Shanahan was chatting with general manager John Lynch on the field when a trainer walked over presumably to deliver the news. It's unclear when Elflein will return.

Elflein, 30, went to Ohio State and was a third-round pick of the Minnesota Vikings in 2017. He has played in 65 games during his career and started 64 of them, which shows that he's a starting-caliber center when healthy.

But since 2020, Elflein has played in just 22 games. And last year, he spent the entire season on the Arizona Cardinals' Injured Reserve List with an undisclosed injury. So he isn't healthy often.

The 49ers signed Elflein probably because they want a backup center behind starter Jake Brendel. Last season, the backup center was Jon Feliciano, but now he's the starting right guard, so the 49ers need someone else who can snap the ball if Brendel goes down. During OTAs and minicamp, the 49ers played Ben Bartch at center, but have since moved him to guard. And the first week of training camp, the 49ers played Nick Zakelj at center, but he's not good.

So the backup center job is Elflein's to lose if he can just get healthy.

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Grant Cohn

GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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