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49ers Cancel Joint Practices with Saints Due to Excessive Injuries

This is a smart move.

Grant Cohn

May 10, 2024; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan watches during the 49ers rookie minicamp at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA. Mandatory Credit: Robert Kupbens-USA TODAY Sports
May 10, 2024; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan watches during the 49ers rookie minicamp at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA. Mandatory Credit: Robert Kupbens-USA TODAY Sports / Robert Kupbens-USA TODAY Sports
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This is a smart move.

The 49ers have canceled their joint practices with the Saints this week because they're worried they don't have enough healthy players to make the joint practices worthwhile, according to ESPN. That's an embarrassing reason to cancel joint practices, but it's the right to do given the circumstances.

The 49ers and Saints both were supposed to fly to Irvine this week to practice against each other before flying to Santa Clara this weekend to play a preseason game in Levi's Stadium. The plan always seemed strange. Why give the players an extra trip? Why not just practice in Santa Clara?

The 49ers could have hosted the joint practices at their facility, but decided to take an extra trip to UC Irvine because that facility has twice as many football fields as the 49ers have. So Kyle Shanahan wanted more space. But the 49ers now have at least a dozen players with soft tissue injuries, and those players really don't need to take an unnecessary flight because flying increases inflammation.

The 49ers have had joint practices each of the past three seasons. In 2021, they flew to Costa Mesa to have joint practices with the Chargers before playing a preseason game in Los Angeles. In 2022, the 49ers flew to Minnesota to have joint practices with the Vikings before a road preseason game. And in 2023, they flew to Las Vegas to have joint practices with the Raiders before a road preseason game.

On more than one occassion, Shanahan has said he thinks joint practices are more valuable than preseason games. So for him to cancel them, the injury issue must be serious.

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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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