Why the 49ers Should Trade Deebo Samuel

It wasn't long ago that Samuel WAS the 49ers offense.
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Deebo Samuel has had an outstanding career with the 49ers. But he'll be 29 next season, he's not getting better and he'll take up more than 10 percent of the team's salary cap. It's time for the 49ers to trade him.

It wasn't long ago that Samuel WAS the 49ers offense. He was their No. 1 receiver and the best running back, too. Any time he touched the ball, he was a threat to score a touchdown.

Now, he's not a particularly effective running back anymore -- the 49ers hardly ever hand him the ball because they don't need to. They have Christian McCaffrey and Elijah Mitchell. So a big part of Samuel's game is gone.

Plus, he isn't particularly dangerous running end arounds, reverses and jet sweeps anymore -- it seems the league has caught on to those gimmick plays.

In addition, Samuel never has been a good route runner, and he's getting worse. He absolutely cannot beat quality man-to-man coverage, as we saw in the Super Bowl when Chiefs nickelback Trent McDuffie shut him down.

Which means Samuel can't get himself open. And that means he's only effective if the opponent is playing zone coverage or if he's catching screen passes. And he's still extremely dangerous with the ball in his hands, but he has become one of the limited players on the 49ers offense.

If the 49ers traded Samuel, they still would have Brandon Aiyuk, Jauan Jennings, George Kittle, Christian McCaffrey and Kyle Juszczyk -- that's an elite group of weapons. If they were smart, they'd trade Samuel for an offensive linemen, because they don't need more weapons.

That's what the Chiefs would do.


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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.