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The 49ers Promote Tashaun Gipson to the Active Roster

A familiar face is back.

Grant Cohn

Dec 10, 2023; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers safety Tashaun Gipson Sr. (31) before the game against the Seattle Seahawks at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
Dec 10, 2023; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers safety Tashaun Gipson Sr. (31) before the game against the Seattle Seahawks at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images / Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
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A familiar face is back.

The 49ers just promoted veteran safety Tashaun Gipson from the practice squad to the 53-man roster. To make room for Gipson, the 49ers placed rookie linebacker Tatum Bethune on Injured Reserve with a knee injury.

Gipson, 34, started 33 regular season games and six playoff games for the 49ers from 2022 to 2023. He's a ball hawk who has intercepted 33 passes in his career. Which means the 49ers just might have some use for him in the near future if they can keep their season alive.

This offseason, Gipson signed with the Jacksonville Jaguars. But he quickly got suspended for using performance-enhancing drugs, and the Jaguars eventually released him. So the 49ers signed him to their practice squad. And now he's back on the active roster.

The past two weeks, the 49ers called up Gipson from the practice squad just for game day -- the team can call up two practice squad players every week. And in those games, Gipson played special teams, which have been a huge issue for the 49ers this season. So he's helping to fix their biggest weakness. Hence his promotion.

It's a long shot that Gipson will regain his spot as a starting safety this season because the 49ers have two young safeties they like -- Ji'Ayir Brown and Malik Mustapha. But if either player gets injured, you can bet that Gipson will be the next man up ahead of George Odum.

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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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