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Why the 49ers Have Ranked Top 10 in Injuries the Past Eight Seasons

It's clear something changed in 2013. Before then, the 49ers had good injury "luck." Since then, they've had terrible injury "luck." Something bigger than luck must be at play.

Grant Cohn

The 49ers are an excellent team when healthy. But they're never healthy.

The 49ers have ranked top 10 in the NFL in games lost to injury each of the past eight seasons. That's a horrendous trend. Last season, they lost the most games to injury of any team in the league. 

See for yourself:

According to that chart, here's where the 49ers ranked in terms of games lost to injury since 2008. The higher the ranking, the more games lost. Which means the lower the ranking, the better.

2008: 25th

2009: 23rd

2010: 28th

2011: 25th

2012: 32nd

2013: 10th

2014: 5th

2015: 7th

2016: 9th

2017: 10th

2018: 4th

2019: 6th

2020: 1st

It's clear something changed in 2013. Before then, the 49ers had good injury "luck." Since then, they've had terrible injury "luck." Something bigger than luck must be at play.

In 2013, former 49ers general manager Trent Baalke started drafting red-shirt players, meaning guys who were hurt when they were drafted and were expecting to miss their rookie seasons. That year, Baalke drafted Tank Carradine in Round 2 and Marcus Lattimore in Round 4. Baalke would go on to draft at least one red-shirt player every year after 2013 until the 49ers fired him in 2017.

His replacement, John Lynch, hasn't drafted many red shirts, although Kentavius Street was one. Instead, Lynch signs players who are coming off major injuries, such as Kwon Alexander, or trades for players with extensive injury histories, such as Dee Ford.

It seems the 49ers made an organizational decision in 2013 to devalue durability. It almost seems like they prefer injury-prone players, because they're cheaper than the durable ones.

Bad decision. Durability matters. Hopefully the 49ers have figured that out.

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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