The Solution to the 49ers Injury Problem

Hiring a trainer from the NHL seems like a failed experiment.

When a team wants to upgrade its offense, it hires an offensive coach from a team that scores lots of points.

When a team wants to upgrade its defense, it hires a defensive coach from a team that gives up a miniscule amount of points. This is standard business in the NFL.

So why should teams treat their training staffs any differently?

The 49ers training staff currently consists of Ben Peterson, who came from the NFL, and Dustin Perry, who came the University of Minnesota. Perry has been with the 49ers since 2017, and Peterson since 2019. Neither person has reduced the 49ers injuries.

In 2017, the 49ers lost 91.6 games due to injury. In 2018, they lost 97.2 games to injury. In 2019, they lost 95.8 games to injury. And in 2020, they lost a league-leading 166.6 games to injury.

Bad trend.

Hiring a trainer from the NHL seems like a failed experiment. If the 49ers want to fix their injury problem, the solution seems obvious: replace the existing training staff with one that has a track record of results. The same way a team would fix its offense or defense.

First, let's find a team that does a good job preventing injuries.

Since 2017, the Rams have lost just 40 games per season on average, as opposed to the 49ers, who have lost 113 games per season to injury on average since 2017. Huge difference.

The 49ers should hire the Rams assistant trainer and make him their lead trainer. That way, if the injuries persist, we'll know it's not the training staff's fault.


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.