Jordan Mason Should Surpass Elijah Mitchell on 49ers Depth Chart

Mason has been better than Mitchell all year. That's because Mason has been healthy all year, while Mitchell has been injured off and on since his rookie season in 2021, and the injuries have taken their toll.

Grant Cohn | Oct 16, 2023

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers might have to play a game or two without Christian McCaffrey, who injured his oblique/rib Sunday against the Browns. If he misses time, the new starting running back should be Jordan Mason, not Elijah Mitchell.

It's time the 49ers elevate Mason on the depth chart.

Against the Rams, Mitchell was the first running back off the bench when McCaffrey got injured. But Mitchell lost 3 yards on 2 carries -- he was awful. Then Mason got a chance to play, and he gained 27 yards and scored a touchdown on 5 carries.

As a rookie, Mitchell started 10 games and rushed for 963 yards. But in his second season, he played in only five games. This season, he has played in three games, and he's averaging just 2.7 yards per carry. He's unplayable.

Meanwhile, Mason has appeared in all six games, and he's averaging a whopping 5.6 yards per carry. He could start for lots of teams. He's big, powerful and he runs extremely hard -- even harder than Mitchell. And Mason's body is built to run that hard. Mitchell's body is not. He's much, much smaller than Mason.

Perhaps McCaffrey wouldn't have an injured oblique/rib if the 49ers had used Mason more the first few weeks of the season and not worn down their starting running back and offensive MVP.

Published Oct 16, 2023

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.