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Azeez Al-Shaair Agrees to Sign with the Titans

This is a smart move for the 49ers, who draft and develop linebackers better than any team in the NFL.
Grant Cohn|
Azeez Al-Shaair Agrees to Sign with the Titans
Azeez Al-Shaair Agrees to Sign with the Titans

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers just lost another starter.

Strongside linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair has agreed to a contract with the Tennessee Titans, according to reports, who most likely will give Al-Shaair a bigger role and more playing time than he received with the 49ers.

Al-Shaair is a quality linebacker, but the 49ers already have Fred Warner and Dre Greenlaw -- two impact players whose contracts the 49ers have extended. They can't afford to pay three veteran linebackers, so Al-Shaair is the odd man out. This is a smart move for the 49ers, who draft and develop linebackers better than any team in the NFL.

Take Al-Shaair for example. The 49ers signed him as an undrafted free agent in 2019, and he surprisingly made the 53-man roster as a rookie. Then Al-Shaair played so well that the 49ers eventually traded Kwon Alexander to the New Orleans Saints in 2020 and elevated Al-Shaair to the starting lineup. Then in 2021, Dre Greenlaw injured his groin, so Al-Shaair started 13 games and played extremely well. He deserves this pay day.

The 49ers have a few players already on their roster who can replace Al-Shaair: Oren Burks, whom they signed last season to be a core special teams player; Demetrius Flannigan-Fowles, a former undrafted free agent who has been on the roster since 2019; and Marcelino McCrary-Ball, an undrafted free agent last year who spent his rookie season on the practice squad. 

Any of those three could be the next Al-Shaair, although the best bet would be McCrary-Ball. He flashed big-time potential during the preseason.

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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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