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Should the 49ers Keep or Cut Jake Moody?

Get him off the team.

Grant Cohn

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The 49ers spent a third-round pick on kicker Jake Moody this past offseason. Should they cut him anyway?

A third-round pick is a large investment in a kicker, but it's not a large investment in general. And Moody was atrocious down the stretch this season. 

First, he missed two kicks in the season finale against the Rams -- in retrospect, that was a sign of things to come. Because in the playoffs, he missed one kick in all three games. And the final miss was an extra point attempt that got blocked in the Super Bowl.

Get him off the team.

Nothing about him gives the team confidence. He replaced a borderline Hall of Famer kicker in Robbie Gould who literally never missed a kick in the playoffs -- he was as reliable as they come in the postseason. As opposed to Moody, who is a headcase.

To be fair, Moody also made a 53-yard field goal and a 55-yard field goal in the Super Bowl -- he has a very strong leg. But the 49ers don't need an inconsistent kicker who can boot the ball a long way. They need someone who's reliable inside 45 yards. They need someone they can count on to make kicks under pressure in big games. That's not Moody.

A big reason the Chiefs won the Super Bowl is that their kicker, Harrison Butker, is extremely reliable. They trust him to make any kick in any situation.

The 49ers have to keep searching for the right kicker. Maybe they can Gould 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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