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49ers WR Ricky Pearsall Exceeded Kyle Shanahan's Expecations in 2024

Pearsall seems like one of the 49ers' most promising young players.

Grant Cohn

Dec 30, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Ricky Pearsall (14) during the game against the Detroit Lions at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images
Dec 30, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Ricky Pearsall (14) during the game against the Detroit Lions at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images / Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images
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Just a month ago, people were asking if Ricky Pearsall is a bust.

He had just finished a five-game stretch during which he had two catches and two illegal formation penalties. He seemed unprepared and over his head. But something changed in the final two games of the season.

Finally, head coach Kyle Shanahan started calling lots of plays for Pearsall -- he got targeted 18 times in the last two weeks. And he caught 14 passes, gained 216 yards and scored 2 touchdowns.

Now, Pearsall seems like one of the 49ers' most promising young players.

"I thought Ricky had an unbelievable season," head coach Kyle Shanahan said on Wednesday. "I mean, I know the gunshot wound is the biggest obviously, but I've never had a rookie player miss all of OTAs and training camp and have much of a successful rookie year. It's tough to do that. For him to do that and then get into Week 1, which I knew he would be way behind because of that situation and then get a gunshot wound kind of made me think that we were going to get nothing from him, just in terms of how could we and how hard that would be on him. But how quick he came back from that and then when he did, just to watch him go through rookie things in a live NFL game and then having to watch him come back from that stuff throughout the year and still hit a rookie wall without a foundation of an offseason and stuff like that, I thought it was a huge success for him this year."

You can tell that Shanahan didn't trust Pearsall enough to call his number when the 49ers were fighting for a playoff spot. Once they were eliminated, Shanahan went to Pearsall, and Pearsall delivered.

In retrospect, Shanahan probably should have featured Pearsall much sooner.

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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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