Why the 49ers Should Keep Josh Rosen

There's an extremely plausible scenario in which the 49ers decide Lance won't be ready to start until midway through the season and Jimmy Garoppolo will get injured before Lance is ready to play.

Just because the 49ers drafted Trey Lance doesn't mean they should dump Josh Rosen.

There's an extremely plausible scenario in which the 49ers decide Lance won't be ready to start until midway through the season and Jimmy Garoppolo will get injured before Lance is ready to play. In that case, the 49ers would need someone to bridge the gap between Garoppolo and Lance. 

And Rosen is the best option. Rosen is the third-best quarterback on the team. He's better than Josh Johnson, the soon-to-be-35-year-old career backup quarterback who recently spent time in the XFL. And Rosen is better than Nate Sudfeld, the 27-year-old career backup quarterback from Modesto who has thrown just 37 passes in his entire career. Sudfeld is the human white flag when he steps on the field. He gives his team no chance to win.

As opposed to Rosen, who has started 16 games in the NFL. He won only three, but he played for awful teams, and he's young. Only 24. And he was the 10th pick of the 2018 draft. So he clearly has physical gifts.

If the 49ers could beat the Arizona Cardinals last season with C.J. Beathard, they can win games with Rosen. Because Rosen beat Beathard twice in 2018 when Rosen was the Cardinals starting quarterback.

Plus Rosen is a potential trade chip down the line for the 49ers. If they keep him and develop him, he might be worth something in a few years.

The 49ers would be nuts to get rid of him now.


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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.