The Final Grade For the 2021 49ers Cornerbacks

The 49ers needed a cornerback to step up, and Emmanuel Moseley did.

Grant Cohn | Feb 7, 2022

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San Francisco 49ers

Before the season began, I tweeted that the 49ers were one season-ending injury to Jason Verrett away from having a terrible group of cornerbacks.

Boy, was I wrong.

Verrett tore his ACL Week 1 and missed the rest of the season. This was the 49ers shut-down cornerback and without him, things seemed bleak. In 2020, Verrett played 13 games, allowed 50 catches on 75 targets (66%), broke up 7 passes, intercepted 2, gave up 1 touchdown catch and allowed a passer rating just 76.2. Elite numbers.

The 49ers needed a cornerback to step up.

And Emmanuel Moseley did. Here were his numbers in 2021: 11 games, 31 catches on 55 targets (56.3%), 11 pass breakups, 1 interception, 0 touchdowns and a mere 65.6 quarterback rating allowed. Which means Moseley put up better numbers than Verrett did the previous season. Who would have guessed?

Moseley has emerged as a top-notch starting corner. By the end of the season, opposing offenses mostly stayed away from him and challenged other cornerbacks.

Josh Norman was an easy target, and a terrible corner. But when the 49ers finally replaced him with rookie cornerback Ambry Thomas, suddenly they had no liabilities in their secondary. Thomas improved dramatically toward the end of the season, altough when he did get beat, he tended to give up big plays and touchdowns.

And nickelback K'Waun Williams was as solid and well-rounded as ever. If the 49ers had played him, Moseley and Thomas together all season, they would have had an above average trio.

Expect Moseley and Thomas to start next season, while Williams most likely will sign elsewhere in free agency.

FINAL GRADE: B.

Published Feb 7, 2022

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.