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Reassessing the 49ers' Trade for Chase Young

The 49ers really thought Young would be the missing piece to their Super Bowl run.

Grant Cohn

Reassessing the 49ers' Trade for Chase Young
Reassessing the 49ers' Trade for Chase Young /
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The 49ers recently threw away a fifth-round pick in 2025 when the NFL penalized them for multiple accounting errors. That was bad. But they also threw away a third-round pick in 2024 when they traded it to the Washington Commanders for Chase Young, and that was worse.

The 49ers really thought Young would be the missing piece to their Super Bowl run. They thought they were getting a bargain, like when they traded a third-round pick to Washington for Trent Williams. They figured Washington didn't know what they had in Young, and that Young would play better for them.

Sure, the Commanders drafted Young with the second pick in the 2020 and gave him every opportunity to play hard and show something -- anything. And he never did. Even in a contract year. 

The 49ers thought Young would play hard for them because they were a Super Bowl contender. Wrong. They also thought Young would play hard because he was reuniting with Nick Bosa, his college teammate. Wrong.

As Washington already knew, nothing could motivate Young to play hard. Even in the NFC Championship Game, he jogged around the field during touchdown runs. The Commanders must have laughed.

This offseason, the 49ers didn't even offer Young a contract -- they were done with him. And so he signed with the New Orleans Saints, who are going nowhere. A perfect spot for him.

And sure, the 49ers should eventually get a compensatory pick in exchange for Young, but it won't be as valuable as the third-round pick they traded to get him.

I bet they wish they had that back.

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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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