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The 49ers have a Leadership Gap

Because Kyle Shanahan is not a leader, as far as I can tell, there's a leadership gap on the 49ers. And they need leaders in the locker room whether Shanahan is a leader or not.

Grant Cohn

Because Kyle Shanahan is not a leader, as far as I can tell, there's a leadership gap on the 49ers. And they need leaders in the locker room whether Shanahan is a leader or not.

And there are no leaders in the 49ers locker room currently. George Kittle is not a leader. Great player with a wonderful, youthful exuberance. But not a leader.

Richard Sherman and Joe Staley were the leaders last season and they're both gone. Sherman is on Injured Reserve for now and Staley retired this offseason. They were the grownups in the locker room. One won a Super Bowl. The other was a career-long 49er. So there's a leadership gap.

What does it mean to have leadership?

This is something Steve Young used to tell my dad all the time: "It means we have a standard. It means we are the Forty Freaking Niners. We have a standard of practice, of commitment of our mentality and how we play."

Shanahan, as a head coach, doesn't seem to have that standard, or can't convey that standard. So he needed Staley and Sherman to embody the standard and remind people of it the way Young did, the way Joe Montana did, the way Jerry Rice did, the way Bill Walsh did.

This team not only doesn't have the standard, it lost track of it. Misplaced it.

If Staley and Sherman had been on the field last Sunday, there's no way the 49ers would have gotten out by the Miami Freaking Dolphins. Those two wouldn't have allowed it.

Here's what Staley thought of the 49ers performance:

Good question, Joe.

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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