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49ers LB Fred Warner and George Kittle Expected to Play vs. Cardinals

Good news for the 49ers.

Grant Cohn

January 20, 2024; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle (85) and linebacker Fred Warner (54) celebrate after defeating the Green Bay Packers in a 2024 NFC divisional round game at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-Imagn Images
January 20, 2024; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle (85) and linebacker Fred Warner (54) celebrate after defeating the Green Bay Packers in a 2024 NFC divisional round game at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-Imagn Images / Kyle Terada-Imagn Images
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Good news for the 49ers.

Fred Warner and George Kittle are expected to play today against the Arizona Cardinals, according to ESPN's Adam Schefter. Both players missed practice on Wednesday and Thursday and were limited for Friday's walkthrough. But they're veterans who don't need to practice all week to play on Sunday.

Warner has an ankle injury that kept him out of the second half of last week's win over the Patriots. Kittle has a rib injury that he also suffered last week but returned to that game.

The question is how will each player hold up?

The 49ers have two games in the next four days -- they play Thursday night in Seattle against the Seahawks. How will Warner's ankle and Kittle's rib feel after Sunday's game against Arizona and will they be too sore for Thursday night?

Keep in mind, today's game is projected to reach temperatures of 95 degrees. The game will be incredibly taxing on all the players. So far this season, Kittle has missed part or all of every game except the first one. Will he make it through this one unscathed?

Warner by contrast has missed only one game in his career -- he's the iron man of the 49ers defense. They need him at his best to beat the Cardinals today.

Because last season when the 49ers faced Arizona, the Cardinals rushed for 234 yards and two touchdowns, and that was when both Warner and Dre Greenlaw were healthy. Now Greenlaw is out with an Achilles tear and Warner is less than 100 percent.

It will be interesting to see how the 49ers run defense performs in particular.

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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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