Emmanuel Moseley to Miss Several Weeks with a High Ankle Sprain

The 49ers most likely will start Josh Norman and Dontae Johnson down the stretch.

Grant Cohn | Dec 6, 2021

More bad news for the 49ers secondary.

They already lost No. 1 cornerback Jason Verrett for the season back in Week 1. Now, they will lose No. 2 cornerback Emmanuel Moseley for several weeks due to a high-ankle sprain he suffered Sunday in the 49ers' 30-23 loss to the Seahawks, according to head coach Kyle Shanahan. Which means Moseley could miss the rest of the regular season. The 49ers have just five games remaining.

So the 49ers most likely will start Josh Norman and Dontae Johnson down the stretch. Or the 49ers could start rookies Deommodore Lenoir and Ambry Thomas, although that seems unlikely given how pooly they've performed in limited opportunities.

“We'll see how the week plays out," Shanahan said. "We're obviously struggling in that area. Now losing E-Man definitely doesn't make it easier, but we're going to keep having the young guys compete. Hopefully they can get more and more ready. D-Mo [DB Deommodore Lenoir] did a couple good things in the game, but then struggled on some things also so. I’m happy with [CB] Ambry [Thomas] and how he played on special teams. I thought it was his best game by far on special teams, having three tackles on it and doing the right thing on those. And hopefully those two can up their game up and push Dontae and Norman a little bit. But those are the guys that we’ve got.”

And those are terrible options. Winning games with the cornerbacks they have left will be quite the challenge.

Published Dec 6, 2021

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.