49ers Sign D.J. Jones to a One-Year Deal

The 49ers are working hard to recreate a team that just went 6-10. They must feel injuries were the only thing they held them back in 2020. And maybe they're right.

Grant Cohn | Mar 17, 2021

They're running it back, apparently.

The 49ers just re-signed another one of their free agents -- nose tackle D.J. Jones, according to the NFL Network's Ian Rapoport. It's a one-year deal, but the exact terms have not been announced.

So far this offseason, the 49ers mostly have signed their own players, with the exception of outside linebacker Samson Ebukam and center Alex Mack. Those two are the only new editions. The rest of the signings were 49ers last season.

Which means the 49ers are working hard to recreate a team that just went 6-10. They must feel injuries were the only thing they held them back in 2020. And maybe they're right.

But Jones, 26, is one of the players who gets injured every season. He missed two games in 2020, five games in 2019, six games in 2018 and seven games in 2017.

But he's good when he's healthy. He's a strong, stout nose tackle who holds his ground well against the run, plus he's surprisingly explosive and slippery as a pass rusher. The past two seasons, he recorded 5 sacks despite playing only 723 snaps, and almost never playing on third downs, which is the primary pass-rushing down.

When the offseason began, Jones seemed like a player who had priced himself out of San Francisco, because he's good and the 49ers didn't have much salary-cap space. But it turns out the 49ers had more cap space than most teams, and the rest of the league is scrambling just to get under the cap, so Jones didn't have much of a market.

Jones most likely will sign elsewhere next season when the cap goes back up. For now, he's staying. So good for the 49ers.

But instead of running it back with the same team, maybe they should have gone after some new impact players, such as center Rodney Hudson, whom the Arizona Cardinals just acquired in a trade with the Raiders. Now D.J. Jones and the 49ers will have to face Hudson twice a season.

I'm just saying.

Published Mar 17, 2021

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.