All 49ers

Deommodore Lenoir is the 49ers' Most Overlooked Player

Lenoir has established himself as a good starting cornerback, and he's only 24-years-old.

Grant Cohn

In this story:

Every time the 49ers win, they bring the usual suspects to the post-game podium.

Deommodore Lenoir is not one of the usual suspects.

You know who they are: George Kittle, Kyle Juszczyk, Nick Bosa, Christian McCaffrey, Deebo Samuel, Fred Warner and Brock Purdy. Those are the spokesmen for the team. They speak for everyone in the locker room and get all the media attention.

Then there are the 49ers players who almost never go to the podium despite how well they play every week. We're talking Javon Hargrave, Dre Greenlaw, Charvarius Ward, Tashaun Gipson, Aaron Banks and Deommodore Lenoir.

Perhaps those players prefer not to talk. But Lenoir doesn't seem shy. After the 49ers beat down the Cowboys on Sunday, a reporter asked him if that win proved the 49ers are the best team in the NFL

"For sure," Lenoir said. "When you look at that game and look at other teams, it's not even close. I even try to give people the benefit of the doubt but it's not close."

A player has to be legitimately good to talk like that, and Lenoir is legitimately good. Through five games this season, he has allowed zero touchdown passes and has given up a passer rating of just 76.4 when targeted. Those are elite numbers. And yet, nobody in the national media seems to care or even know who he is.

Lenoir has established himself as a good starting cornerback, and he's only 24-years-old. The 49ers will need to give him a contract extension at the end of the season.

They should bring him to the podium every once in a while, too. He has earned the recognition.

Published
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.

Home/News