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Will the 49ers Re-Sign Sam Darnold?

He still looks like the same Darnold who flopped in New York and Carolina. Which means he might actually come back to the 49ers.

Grant Cohn

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Sam Darnold is an unrestricted free agent. Will the 49ers re-sign him?

From Darnold's perspective, he probably would like to find a new team, one where he has a chance to play. He signed with the 49ers when Brock Purdy had a torn UCL -- the team didn't know exactly when he would return. There was a chance Darnold would have to start the first few games of the season. That's probably why he signed with the 49ers. Of course, Purdy recovered rapidly and had a Pro Bowl season and Darnold only started one game -- Week 18, and he lost.

So signing with the 49ers backfired to an extent for Darnold, because he didn't get to show on the field that he has improved. He still looks like the same Darnold who flopped in New York and Carolina. Which means he might actually come back to the 49ers.

No team that needs a starting quarterback looks at Darnold as their solution. I'm willing to guess that's true. At this point in his career, he's a backup, and his only allure is that he knows Kyle Shanahan's system, so he can be a backup for any team that runs it, and more teams run it every year.

So if Darnold can't get any good offers on the open market, it could be in his interest to sign another one-year deal with the 49ers and to keep learning Shanahan's system. That way he can be a backup in the NFL for years to come.

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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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