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Deebo Samuel Seems on Track to Play in the NFC Championship

If Deebo Samuel is healthy enough to be limited on Thursday, I have a hard time seeing him skipping the NFC Championship Game.

Grant Cohn

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SANTA CLARA -- This is good news.

Deebo Samuel is a limited participant at Thursday's practice, which means he seems on track to play in the NFC Championship despite injuring his shoulder this past Saturday in the 49ers' divisional playoff win over the Packers.

A limited practice participant stretches with the team and warms up with his position and does everything the other players do except 11-on-11 team drills. But if a player is healthy enough to be limited on Thursday, he generally will be healthy enough to play on Sunday.

And if Deebo Samuel is healthy enough to be limited on Thursday, I have a hard time seeing him skipping the NFC Championship Game. It's too important, and there's no guarantee the 49ers will win it without him.

So I expect Samuel to suit up and start this Sunday. But that doesn't necessarily mean he'll make it through the entire contest.

Samuel's game is based on breaking tackles. How many tackles can he break with a bum shoulder before it hurts so bad he can't play, like last week? Technically, the first hit he takes could knock him out of the game. 

So the 49ers have to be smart with Samuel. They can't afford to feature him in their game plan because there's no guarantee he'll be in the game when the second quarter starts. So I'm guessing they'll give him the ball a couple times, but mostly they'll use him as a decoy, someone who goes in motion and draws attention but rarely gets the ball.

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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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