An Honest Assessment of 49ers' Moves in Free Agency

Have the 49ers really improved?
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The 49ers have made lots of moves through the first wave of free agency, but have they improved?

The first move they made was to ask Arik Armstead to do them a solid and accept a pay cut, which backfired considering he refused, they cut him and now he's on the Jaguars. Almost every move the 49ers have made in free agency has addressed this blunder.

Their first choice was to keep Armstead at a reduced price, because Armstead is an excellent player even though he misses a few games every season due to injury. To be fair, so does Trent Williams, and the 49ers keep him around.

So the 49ers didn't get their first choice. Instead, they had to scramble to replace Armstead with the little cap space they had. So they traded for Maliek Collins, who's a good pass rusher, but not a good run defender. They also signed Jordan Elliott, who's a good run defender, but not a good pass rusher. If you put those two together, they still wouldn't be as good as Armstead when healthy.

In addition, the 49ers signed two defensive ends -- Leonard Floyd and Yetur Gross-Matos -- who are better than the defensive ends the 49ers had last season.

They also signed De'Vondre Campbell after failing to close the deal with Eric Kendricks, which means Campbell is their second choice at linebacker. That's the extent of the 49ers additions so far.

If Armstead gets injured and misses most of next season, then absolutely the 49ers will have gotten better. But if Armstead can stay relatively healthy for Jacksonville, the 49ers just got worse.


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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.