49ers Place Deebo Samuel on Injured Reserve List

The 49ers placed wide receiver Deebo Samuel on the Injured Reserve List Saturday, but his season isn’t over.

Grant Cohn | Sep 12, 2020

The 49ers placed wide receiver Deebo Samuel on the Injured Reserve List Saturday, but his season isn’t over.

Samuel will be eligible to return as soon as Week 4 when the 49ers play the Eagles at Levi’s Stadium. A new rule for this unique season during a pandemic allows teams to place players on I.R. for just three weeks.

On Friday, a reporter asked 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan why the 49ers hadn’t yet placed Samuel on I.R. Here’s what Shanahan said:

“We believed he had a good chance to play this week. It didn’t go the way we hoped, but he still will be day to day going into next week. We felt there was a chance. We’ll see how next week goes. Also, something with the rules that because it happened before training camp, which was considered a non-football injury, for some reason we couldn’t do that.”

Good thing the 49ers got that figured out.

Samuel broke his foot on June 18 while working out on his own in preparation for training camp. He has done no football activities since he injured himself, but he apparently is healthy enough that the 49ers thought he had a chance to play against the Cardinals. I would be surprised if he doesn’t return Week 4 against the Eagles.

The 49ers made additional roster moves on Saturday. They’re allowed to call up two practice squad players for each game. And for this game, they have called up center Hroniss Grassu and cornerback Dontae Johnson. Neither player likely will play, but both will provide critical depth at thin positions.

Published Sep 12, 2020

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.