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Dre Greenlaw Out 6-8 Weeks with Groin Injury

Greenlaw injured his groin after intercepting a pass and returning it for a touchdown last Sunday against the Detroit Lions.

Grant Cohn

Bad news for the 49ers defense.

Linebacker Dre Greenlaw will have a procedure to fix a groin injury that will sideline him the next 6 to 8 weeks, according to the NFL Network's Ian Rapoport.

Greenlaw injured his groin after intercepting a pass and returning it for a touchdown last Sunday against the Detroit Lions. He did not play in the second half.

Azeez Al-Shaair moved from strongside linebacker to weakside linebacker, and played extremely well. Al-Shaair is a quality player who looked explosive Week 1. He can make up for the loss of Greenlaw.

But Greenlaw's absence also will make Demetrius Flannigan-Fowles the strongside linebacker in the base defense. And he's just a backup. 

The 49ers' upcoming opponent, the Eagles, like to run the ball out of two-tight-end formations, which will force the 49ers to put Flannigan-Fowles on the field. Which means he could play quite a bit this Sunday against an offense that rushed for 173 yards Week 1 against the Atlanta Falcons.

In addition, the 49ers defense won't have shutdown cornerback Jason Verrett, who tore his ACL Week 1 and will miss the entire season. Plus, No. 2 cornerback Emmanuel Moseley has a knee injury and might not play this Sunday, either. Which means the 49ers could be missing their top two corners as well as Greenlaw.

The 49ers defense could struggle Sunday against the Eagles. San Francisco will need its offense to run the ball and control the game as it usually does. The defense is not equipped to win this game on its own.

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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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