All 49ers

49ers Paying Dearly for Rushing Players Back from Injury this Season

Maybe if the 49ers were more careful with their players, they wouldn't reinjure themselves so often.

Grant Cohn

Oct 6, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers offensive tackle Trent Williams (71) warms up before the game against the Arizona Cardinals at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
Oct 6, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers offensive tackle Trent Williams (71) warms up before the game against the Arizona Cardinals at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images / Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
In this story:

Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong for the 49ers this season.

Injuries and bad luck are big reasons they're currently 6-8. But the 49ers are at least partially responsible for some of these injuries lingering longer than they needed to.

Take Trent Williams. He's most likely out for the season with an ankle injury he suffered Week 10 against the Buccaneers. At first, he could walk on his injured ankle. So the 49ers gave him a pain injection and made him play the following week against the Seahawks, hoping he wouldn't make his ankle worse. But he did, and he hasn't played since.

Then there's Nick Bosa. He injured his oblique in practice, but the 49ers didn't shut him down to let him heal. He played through it for two games before leaving the Week 11 game against the Seahawks with another oblique injury that knocked him out for three weeks. Bosa said the second injury occurred because he overcompensated while playing through his first injury.

Then there's Isaac Guerendo. He injured his foot, played the next week on it and then pulled his hamstring.

Then, of course, there's Christian McCaffrey. He missed the first eight games with bilateral Achilles tendonitis, returned Week 10, had 19 touches in his season debut and 23 touches the following week. In just his fourth game, he suffered a season-ending knee injury which could have been an overcompensation injury like Bosa's.

And then there was Dre Greenlaw last week. He played his first game in almost a year after tearing his Achilles. And instead of getting his feet wet, he played 27 of the 49ers' 30 defensive snaps in the first half, and then couldn't play in the second half. After the game, he could barely move.

Maybe if the 49ers were more careful with their players, they wouldn't reinjure themselves so often.

Download and follow The Cohn Zohn Podcast.

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.

Home/News