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The 49ers Should Release Deebo Samuel this Offseason

All things considered, Deebo Samuel might be the most overpaid player in the NFL.

Grant Cohn

Nov 12, 2024; San Francisco, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Deebo Samuel watches action between the Golden State Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks in the third quarter at the Chase Center. Mandatory Credit: Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images
Nov 12, 2024; San Francisco, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Deebo Samuel watches action between the Golden State Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks in the third quarter at the Chase Center. Mandatory Credit: Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images / Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images
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All things considered, Deebo Samuel might be the most overpaid player in the NFL.

He's getting nearly $24 million per season and it's hard to say what he does well at this stage of his career. He's not a good route runner. He drops a lot of passes. And he's not an effective running back anymore. And yet, the 49ers keep forcing him the ball simply to justify his massive contract when they'd be better off giving his snaps to rookie wide receivers Ricky Pearsall and Jacob Cowing.

Through 10 games, Samuel has just 34 catches and 2 touchdowns. He's getting outproduced by Jauan Jennings who gets paid less than $8 million per season. Jennings has been one of the few bright spots on the 49ers this season, while Samuel represents everything that's wrong with their culture.

Samuel is a captain, which means he should set the standard for professionalism and talk to the media after wins and losses. All the other captains do. But after the 49ers' 38-10 loss to the Packers, a game in which he had just 21 yards and dropped two passes, one of which got intercepted, he declined to talk. He wouldn't face the music.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago Samuel got in kicker Jake Moody's face after he missed a field goal, then put his hands on long snapper Taybor Pepper's neck. This was on the sideline during the fourth quarter of a game the 49ers won. They were winning when Samuel did this. Who is he to hold them accountable? He doesn't even hold himself accountable. Instead, he points fingers. For the record, he has 42 yards in two games since he started a fight with his teammates.

The 49ers need to start releasing older players whose production doesn't match their contracts. That's what they did last year with Arik Armstead. They asked him to take a massive pay cut, he declined and they released him with a post-June-1 designation.

The 49ers should do the same thing with Deebo in a few months.

Frankly, they should have moved on from him a while ago.

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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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