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Contract Details Show 49ers Easily Could Have Re-Signed Dre Greenlaw

This one hurts.

Grant Cohn

Nov 19, 2023; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers linebacker Dre Greenlaw (57) during the third quarter against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
Nov 19, 2023; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers linebacker Dre Greenlaw (57) during the third quarter against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images / Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
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This one hurts.

When it was announced that Dre Greenlaw signed a three-year, $35 million contract with the Denver Broncos, it made sense why the 49ers let him go. They simply couldn't afford to commit themselves long-term to a linebacker coming off an injury.

But now the contract details of Greenlaw's deal with Denver have come out, and it's clear his contract essentially is a one-year deal with team options for more.

Greenlaw has no guaranteed money in his contract after this year. So while it's a three-year, $35 million deal on paper, in reality, it's a one-year, $11.5 million contract. Nothing more is guaranteed. And that's more than reasonable for a player such as Greenlaw who is absolutely dominant when healthy.

The 49ers probably offered Greenlaw a one-year deal worth significantly less than $11.5 million, which is silly considering they gave backup tight end Luke Farrell nearly $7 million per season and they gave fullback Kyle Juszczyk $4 million per season.

Instead of signing those two non-offensive-linemen blocking specialists, the 49ers could have given that money to Greenlaw and signed a player with real upside. A player who truly is a leader in the locker room, not just a mouthpiece for the coaching staff.

In retrospect, the 49ers never truly embraced and marketed Greenlaw as a core member of their team. He rarely spoke to the media at the podium. And now he leaves with no goodbye.

Cold world.

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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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