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49ers to Sign Ziggy Ansah

No surprise here.
Grant Cohn|
49ers to Sign Ziggy Ansah
49ers to Sign Ziggy Ansah

No surprise here.

After losing defensive end Nick Bosa to an ACL injury that presumably will end his season, the 49ers are expected to sign free agent defensive end Ziggy Ansah, according to the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport. Ansah will have to go through COVID testing before he can sign his deal.

The 49ers worked out Ansah twice already this offseason, but couldn’t agree to a deal with him, most likely because Ansah’s price tag was too high for the 49ers. But now they can’t quibble over a few hundred thousand dollars. They need all the edge rushers they can get. Because in addition to Nick Bosa, Dee Ford has a mysterious neck injury and the 49ers haven’t said how serious it is. Neck injuries tend to be serious.

Ansah, 31, was the fifth-pick of the 2013 draft. For the first-five seasons of his career, he played for current 49ers defensive line coach Kris Kocurek, who was the Detroit Lions defensive line coach from 2010 to 2017. So Kocurek developed Ansah. And Ansah was an extremely effective pass rusher a few years ago. He recorded 14.5 sacks in 2015 and 12 sacks in 2017.

But Ansah recorded only 6.5 sacks total the past two seasons, as a shoulder injury made him ineffective. He played for the Seahawks in 2019, but they let him leave in free agency after just one disappointing season.

Ansah isn’t what he used to be. But if he’s healthy, he’ll be one of the best edge rushers the 49ers have, and he could play a vital role in the 49ers’ playoff push. They’ll need him to play Sunday against the Giants. We’ll see if he’s ready.

Published
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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