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49ers DC Nick Sorensen Gives Dee Winters Mixed Reviews

What exactly wasn't perfect about Winters' performance?

Grant Cohn

Jul 25, 2024; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator Nick Sorensen answers questions at a press conference following Day 3 of training camp at SAP Performance Facility. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-USA TODAY Sports
Jul 25, 2024; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator Nick Sorensen answers questions at a press conference following Day 3 of training camp at SAP Performance Facility. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-USA TODAY Sports / D. Ross Cameron-USA TODAY Sports
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SANTA CLARA -- One of the most intriguing young players on the 49ers is second-year linebacker Dee Winters.

He looks noticeably better than last season when he was a rookie. Fred Warner even said that Winters was the 49ers' best player during OTAs. But players don't tackle during practice. The big test for Winters is the preseason, and this past Saturday in the 49ers' 17-13 loss to the Titans, Winters drew mixed reviews from defensive coordinator Nick Sorensen.

“Dee was fun," Sorensen said. "He played hard, he was flying around. It wasn't perfect, some of the execution stuff, but just seeing him, like I was saying, just taking that next step to cut it loose, you saw that. So it was fun to see Dee get out there, get some playing time and play fast and violent.”

What exactly wasn't perfect about Winters' performance?

“It's just assignments sometimes and knowing where to line up. Just being in the right spot. It's just details, the fundamental details. And then once you have that and that’s second nature, that's when you see him really flying and taking his shots. We want him to play like that just all the time. So it's just, how can we cut it loose like that as consistently as possible?”

Coaches often say that players need to know their alignment, assignment and technique on every play. So Winters currently is having issues with two of the three fundamentals. Until he masters the basics, I doubt we'll see him much in the regular season.

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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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