Talanoa Hufanga Compares 49ers DC Nick Sorensen to DeMeco Ryans

Sounds like they hired the right defensive coordinator.

Grant Cohn | Jun 30, 2024

Feb 5, 2024; Las Vegas, NV, USA; San Francisco 49ers safety Talanoa Hufanga (29) interviews Blue Man Group during Super Bowl LVIII Opening Night at Allegiant Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Lucas Peltier-USA TODAY Sports / Lucas Peltier-USA TODAY Sports

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San Francisco 49ers

SANTA CLARA -- The 49ers defense misses DeMeco Ryans.

You can tell by the way they talk about him still. He's entering his second season as the Houston Texans head coach, and yet 49ers players still bring him up all the time, especially when asked about new defensive coordinator Nick Sorensen.

On Wednesday at minicamp, I asked Hufanga what he likes about Sorensen. Notice how many times he brings up Ryans.

"He has been there already in the meetings, so it's not like he's a fresh, new face," Hufanga said. "He knows what the system was. He has been it with DeMeco Ryans as well, so he knows what we're trying to accomplish. He makes tweaks here and there. The good thing is his energy. It's very much like DeMeco's style. They're two different coaches, but it's the same system, philosophy and the way they teach is very competitive and energetic. That's something I appreciate about them."

TRANSLATION: Sorensen is no Steve Wilks.

Wilks clearly was the opposite of Ryans because Wilks has low energy and did not know the system as well as the players did. They lost patience with him so quickly because he wasn't one of them. Sorensen is one of them, which means he has a chance to succeed. It's possible the players will play as hard for him as they did for Ryans. Because Ryans isn't a defensive genius -- he simply is a smart coach and his players play like crazy for him. Under Wilks, the 49ers players went through the motions half the time.

Sounds like they hired the right defensive coordinator.

Published Jun 5, 2024|Modified Jun 30, 2024

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.