49ers DE Yetur Gross-Matos is Week-to-Week with a Knee Injury

The thinnest position on the 49ers just got a little thinner.

Grant Cohn | Aug 26, 2024

Aug 10, 2024; Nashville, Tennessee, USA; San Francisco 49ers linebacker Yetur Gross-Matos (94) down in his stance against the Tennessee Titans during the first half at Nissan Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Steve Roberts-USA TODAY Sports / Steve Roberts-USA TODAY Sports

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San Francisco 49ers

The thinnest position on the 49ers just got a little thinner.

Defensive end Yetur Gross-Matos suffered a knee injury Friday night in the 49ers' preseason finale against the Raiders. Kyle Shanahan says he's week-to-week and will have an MRI to reveal the exact nature of the injury. We'll learn the results of the MRI on Wednesday the next time Shanahan speaks to the media. But if Gross-Matos is truly week-to-week, that means he could miss the season opener which is in 14 days.

The 49ers currently have two healthy defensive ends who are presumed to make the 53-man roster: Nick Bosa and Robert Beal Jr. Leonard Floyd suffered a knee injury literally two plays after Gross-Matos went down and is listed as day-to-day. And Drake Jackson is out for the year with a torn patellar tendon which he suffered last season.

The 49ers signed Gross-Matos and Floyd this offseason to replace Chase Young and Randy Gregory who left as free agents. On paper, the 49ers improved at defensive end with those moves. But the 49ers didn't draft any defensive linemen this season, so depth already was an issue before Gross-Matos and Floyd got injured.

The 49ers might be another defensive lineman away from making another deep playoff run. As it stands, the 49ers are seven deep at a position in which they prefer to use eight players in a game. And the thinner the 49ers are at defensive end, the more Nick Bosa has to play. And Bosa never has played more than 78 percent of the 49ers' defensive snaps in a season.

Published Aug 26, 2024

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.