49ers Expected to Make an Internal Hire at Defensive Coordinator

The 49ers would be foolish to repeat the mistake of bringing in an outsider and forcing him to be someone he's not.

Grant Cohn | Feb 22, 2024

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers are searching far and wide for their next defensive coordinator, and when they finish their search, they most likely will promote someone who's on their staff already.

The 49ers are expected to fill their defensive coordinator vacancy internally according to Michael Silver, which would make sense considering how last season turned out. The 49ers didn't want to change their defensive scheme, but they also didn't want to promote a coach from their staff, so they hired Steve Wilks, told him to learn their scheme, didn't let him bring any of his own assistant coaches with him and then fired him at the end of the season.

The 49ers would be foolish to repeat the mistake of bringing in an outsider and forcing him to be someone he's not. Also, an outsider would be foolish to follow in Wilks' footsteps and become the 49ers' next scapegoat.

The 49ers almost have to promote a defensive coordinator from within their staff, because they need the players to buy in, and they didn't buy into Wilks, because they didn't know him. If the 49ers promote defensive backs coach Daniel Bullocks to defensive coordinator, the players should play hard for him because many have known him since 2017 and they seem to like him.

But if the 49ers promote Bullocks to defensive coordinator, you'd have to wonder why they didn't promote him last year. He has been on the staff for eight years. If he wasn't ready to take over the job last year, why is he ready this year? What changed?

Don't be surprised if the 49ers name their next defensive coordinator in the next few days.

Published Feb 22, 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.