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Will the 49ers Trade for Christian McCaffrey?

McCaffrey in the same backfield as Trey Lance would be so difficult to stop. And McCaffrey on the same field as George Kittle, Deebo Samuel and Brandon Aiyuk would give the 49ers the best group of weapons in the league.

Grant Cohn

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The Carolina Panthers reportedly will listen to trade offers for star running back Christian McCaffrey this offseason, and the 49ers might be interested in trading for him.

It's easy to see why the 49ers might want McCaffrey. He's an elite running back when healthy. The 49ers' current starter, Elijah Mitchell, is good, but they never intended him to start -- Raheem Mostert was supposed to fill that role. It's possible the 49ers are still looking for a top-level replacement for Mostert.

McCaffrey is better than Mostert. McCaffrey in the same backfield as Trey Lance would be so difficult to stop. And McCaffrey on the same field as George Kittle, Deebo Samuel and Brandon Aiyuk would give the 49ers the best group of weapons in the league.

Plus, the 49ers have made big investments in running backs in the past. They gave up Jerick McKinnon a four-year, $30 million contract, and just this past year they traded up in Round 3 for Trey Sermon. They're one of the few teams left in the NFL that believes in spending big at the running back position.

And that trend needs to end.

The 49ers need to get with the times and stop spending big money on running backs, because good ones are easy to find and they all get injured.

McCaffrey has played in just 10 games the past two seasons, and he's extremely expensive. He just signed a four-year, $64 million contract extension that runs through 2025. Starting in 2023, he'll be more expensive annually than Kittle.

Trading for McCaffrey would be a huge mistake. The 49ers need to stop making major investments in running backs, because not one of their big acquisitions have panned out.

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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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