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The Final Grade For the 2021 49ers Offensive Linemen

This season, the 49ers ranked 16th out of 32 teams in yards per carry, and 15th out of 32 teams in sack percentage allowed.

Grant Cohn

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This group is the essence of mediocrity.

This season, the 49ers ranked 16th out of 32 teams in yards per carry, and 15th out of 32 teams in sack percentage allowed. Pretty much as average as it gets.

Left tacke Trent Williams is the best left tackle in football -- the best run blocker and the best pass protector. But he missed two regular season games, as he typically does every season, and he played through a high-ankle sprain the NFC Championship game, which was admirable. But the coaching staff should not have played him. He was a liability on one leg.

The rest of the offensive line is decent at best. Left guard Laken Tomlinson is a good run blocker but a sub par pass protector. Same goes for center Alex Mack, except Mack is much older -- 36. He could retire at any time.

Then there's right guard Daniel Brunskill, who shouldn't be a starter. He's high-level backup.

And then there's right tackle Mike McGlinchey, who missed all but the first eight games of the season with a quad injury. When he played, he was decent in pass protection, but slow and inneffective as a run blocker because he bulked up last offseason. In 2020, he lost weight to improve his mobility as a run blocker, but in turn became a pushover in pass protection.

When McGlinchey went down, his replacement was Tom Compton, who's smaller and faster than McGlinchey, and so the run game instantly improved. But Compton is even worse in pass protection than McGlinchey, so George Kittle had to stay in the backfield and block more than the 49ers would have liked.

Other than Williams, every member of this offensive line is replacement. 

To be fair, this unit could improve next season, because the new quarterback, Trey Lance, can move, as opposed to his predecessor, Jimmy Garoppolo, who's a statue.

FINAL GRADE: C-PLUS

Published
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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