Javon Kinlaw Had Season-Ending Knee Surgery

Kinlaw had another knee surgery earlier this year, but it was unsuccessful.

Grant Cohn | Oct 29, 2021

CHICAGO -- Bad news, but nothing shocking.

Second-year defensive tackle Javon Kinlaw has had season-ending surgery on his knee, and the 49ers will place him on Injured Reserve.

"He'll be out this year," head coach Kyle Shanahan said Friday. "We'll have an announcement on it, so there's a lot of things that went into it that they found. But I think the good news is they feel they solved the problem. And obviously, it hurts, him not going to be with us this year. But just talking to the doctor and not me personally, but [general manager] John [Lynch] and our doctors talking to him. They feel, he feels that he found the issue and he thinks that'll be good news for us next year.”

It's nice to know that Shanahan is optimistic Kinlaw will make a full recovery, but it's worth noting the 49ers have been optimistic about Jalen Hurd for three seasons and he still hasn't appeared in a regular season game.

Kinlaw had another knee surgery earlier this year, but it was unsuccessful. He reinjured his knee before training camp, then soldiered his way through the past three months. He rarely practiced fully with the team, as he physically couldn't. In retrospect, it's commendable he gutted it out this long. Good for him.

From the 49ers' perspective, this is terrible news. Kinlaw was their first-round pick last year -- he was supposed to replace DeForest Buckner. And so far, Kinlaw has just 1.5 sacks in his career.

Unless this knee surgery fixes his knee completely, he'll go down as a medical bust.

Published Oct 29, 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.