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Why the 49ers OL Coach got Upset with Dominick Puni vs. the Jets

Sounds like the 49ers don't want to the rookie's head to get to big.

Grant Cohn

Jul 26, 2024; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers run game coordinator Chris Foerster talks to the press during Day 4 of training camp at SAP Performance Facility. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images
Jul 26, 2024; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers run game coordinator Chris Foerster talks to the press during Day 4 of training camp at SAP Performance Facility. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images / D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images
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SANTA CLARA -- The 49ers still won't publicly acknowledge just how good rookie right guard Dominick Puni is.

Puni was one of the stars of the 49ers' Week 1 win over the New York Jets. He was excellent in pass protection and made multiple blocks that sprung long runs. The 49ers haven't had a guard as good as him since Mike Iupati was in his prime a decade ago.

And yet, when asked about Puni this week, offensive line coach Chris Foerster said this:

“He was solid. Solid performance. All of them were. It was a productive game. Jordan Mason had a good game. We win, which was great. Everybody's got a lot of work to do. His first game of the year, Puni’s. For the first time, I had to get kind of upset with him during the game. We made an adjustment in the first quarter and then we're in the third quarter and he's talking about the adjustment we made in the first quarter. And I said, ‘I know we talked about it for six days that this is how we're going to do it, but in the first quarter we decided we weren't going to do it anymore.’ And so, I said that was, it gave me a reason to get fired up in the second half, which was good.”

TRANSLATION: Puni wasn't any better than the other offensive lineman plus Foerster had to yell at him.

Sounds like the 49ers don't want to the rookie's head to get to big. They have to know what an upgrade he is over last season's right guards, Jon Feliciano and Spencer Burford. Suddenly, the 49ers can run to the right, something the couldn't do effectively in the past.

Thank you, Dominick.

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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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