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49ers Hire Brian Griese as Quarterbacks Coach

As long as the 49ers were in the market for quarterbacks who never had coached before, couldn't they have gotten Steve Young?

Grant Cohn

Here's something no one saw coming.

The 49ers have hired former quarterback and television announcer Brian Griese as their quarterbacks coach, according to ESPN.

Griese will replace former 49ers quarterbacks coach Rich Scangarello, who recently became the offensive coordinator of the University of Kentucky. Scangarello was a subpar quarterbacks coach whose players never seemed to improve.

But at least he was a coach. Griese has zero experience coaching. He was a mediocre quarterback in the NFL from 1998 to 2008 whose career passer rating was 82.7. Plus, he was not particularly mobile, which means his skill set was quite different than Trey Lance's. Now Griese has to develop Lance. And he never has developed a quarterback ever.

As long as the 49ers were in the market for quarterbacks who never had coached before, couldn't they have gotten Steve Young? He's an announcer, too, but he actually was a great quarterback, plus he was mobile. So of all the people with zero  coaching experience, he probably would have been the ideal candidate to coach Lance.

And then there's Jeff Garcia, who used to have a quarterback academy for high school atheltes in San Diego, plus he was a better quarterback than Griese. Which means Garcia probably was a better candidate than him, too.

And of course there's Joe Montana, the greatest quarterback ever. Wouldn't he have liked to coach the 49ers quarterbacks? I bet he would have if he thought Young might take the job. Montana seems perpetually jealous of Young.

But no, the 49ers went with Griese, because Kyle Shanahan's father, Mike, coached him on the Broncos. Which means Griese is part of Shanahan's limited network.

Now let's see if he can coach.

Published
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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