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The 49ers Hope Talanoa Hufanga Can Start Practicing Next Week

The season opener is Monday, Sept. 9 against the New York Jets, so Hufanga has fewer than three weeks to prepare himself to play an entire football game. Seems unrealistic when he currently isn't even fit to practice.

Grant Cohn

Oct 23, 2023; Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA; San Francisco 49ers safety Talanoa Hufanga (29) before the game against the Minnesota Vikings at U.S. Bank Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports
Oct 23, 2023; Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA; San Francisco 49ers safety Talanoa Hufanga (29) before the game against the Minnesota Vikings at U.S. Bank Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports / Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports
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SANTA CLARA -- The 49ers are limping toward the start of the regular season.

So many of their key players have missed most or all of training camp, which means they're not in football shape. All Pro strong safety Talanoa Hufanga, who tore his ACL last season, still hasn't practiced with the team. Which means he could start the season on the Physically Unable to Perform List and miss the first four games.

“That's still up for discussion right now," head coach Kyle Shanahan said on Tuesday. "He got cleared last week, so it's been good that he can do real football drills and stuff, with the trainers and everything. He's been going a lot harder with that. I think two days on, two days off. Hopefully it goes real good this week and maybe we could ease him into practice next week.”

The season opener is Monday, Sept. 9 against the New York Jets, so Hufanga has fewer than three weeks to prepare himself to play an entire football game. Seems unrealistic when he currently isn't even fit to practice.

Don't be surprised if the 49ers start slow this season. Because the following players probably won't be in peak football condition for Week 1: Hufanga (ACL), Dre Greenlaw (Achilles), Trent Williams (holding out), Brandon Aiyuk (holding in), Christian McCaffrey (calf), Aaron Banks (pinky), Isaac Yiadom (ankle) and Ricky Pearsall (shoulder).

The 49ers probably expect to make a run during the second half of the season when those players are fully healthy.

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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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