The Cons of the 49ers Potentially Trading Brandon Aiyuk

Aiyuk is an elite route runner and an elite blocker. He's a deep threat who's extremely tough and is not afraid to go over the middle. He's the total package.
The Cons of the 49ers Potentially Trading Brandon Aiyuk
The Cons of the 49ers Potentially Trading Brandon Aiyuk /
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The 49ers reportedly are taking calls from teams that want to trade for Brandon Aiyuk, and if someone offers a first-round pick, the 49ers just might take it so they can save money and salary cap space. 

Trading Aiyuk very well might be the best business decision for the 49ers, but it would be hard to get a better player than him in return. Aiyuk is only 25 years old, he does everything well and he's still improving. Plus he could command much more money on the market than he currently does if the 49ers gave him 10 targets per game instead of 6. The 49ers suppress his value.

Aiyuk is an elite route runner and an elite blocker. He's a deep threat who's extremely tough and is not afraid to go over the middle. He's the total package. If the 49ers trade him for a first-round pick and draft a wide receiver to replace him, there's a high probability he won't be as good as Aiyuk.

In addition, Aiyuk is Brock Purdy's favorite target -- Purdy's passer rating when targeting Aiyuk last season was a whopping 124. They have an outstanding connection, the kind that teams should want to preserve for a while.

Finally, any rookie wide receiver the 49ers draft to replace Aiyuk most likely would take at least three years to fully develop, just as Aiyuk and Deebo Samuel each took three years to reach their peak. The 49ers offense is extremely complicated and hard to learn from players coming from college.

Winning any trade involving Aiyuk would be extremely difficult for the 49ers.


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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.