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49ers to Forfeit Draft Pick Due to Administrative Accounting Errors

Apparently, the 49ers incorrectly disclosed to the league how much money they paid their players in 2022.

Grant Cohn

49ers to Forfeit Draft Pick Due to Administrative Accounting Errors
49ers to Forfeit Draft Pick Due to Administrative Accounting Errors /
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This is emabarrassing.

The 49ers must forfeit a fifth-round pick in 2025 due to multiple administrative accounting errors in 2022. In addition, their fourth-round pick this year will be moved to the end of the round.

Here's what the 49ers had to say in a written statement: "We take responsibility and accept the imposed discipline from the NFL due to a clerical payroll error. At no time did we mislead or otherwise deceive the league or gain a competitive advantage in connection with the payroll mistake.”

Apparently, the 49ers incorrectly disclosed to the league how much money they paid their players in 2022. According to the 49ers, this was an honest mistake and in no way were they trying to create a competitive advantage, which in some ways is even worse.

You could somewhat understand a team trying to bend a rule or find a loophole if it would create an advantage, although that would be cheating. But to simply make an accounting error that costs the team a fifth-round pick plus draft position in Round 4 is incompetent.

We don't yet know precisely what the 49ers did wrong, but it sounds like someone should get fired. I've never heard of an accounting mistake costing a team a draft pick. And a Round 5 pick is not a throwaway pick, considering that's the round in which the 49ers drafted George Kittle, Talanoa Hufanga and Deommodore Lenoir the past few years.

Let's see if anyone in the organization takes personal, public responsibility for this blunder.

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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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