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Is Jeff Wilson Jr. a Top-10 Running Back in the NFL?

It's easy to overlook Wilson, because he has been on the 49ers since 2018, mostly as a backup.
Grant Cohn|
Is Jeff Wilson Jr. a Top-10 Running Back in the NFL?
Is Jeff Wilson Jr. a Top-10 Running Back in the NFL?

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San Francisco 49ers

The first two weeks of the season, the 49ers lost two of their top running backs to injuries. Things looked bleak. Then Jeff Wilson Jr. stepped up.

It's easy to overlook Wilson, because he has been on the 49ers since 2018, mostly as a backup. And last season, he didn't play, because he tore his meniscus during minicamp and never quite recovered.

Now he's back, and he's averaging a whopping 5.1 yards per carry this season while carrying a large workload. He has carried the ball 74 times through five games. Of all the running backs in the NFL with at least 70 carries, only Nick Chubb, Saquon Barkley and Josh Jacobs are averaging more yards per carry than Wilson.

There's more.

If you throw out 2021, the season Wilson was injured, and take his stats from his five games so far from 2022, and add them to his stats from 2020, you get 17 games (a full season), 200 carries, 1,178 yards from scrimmage, 12 touchdowns and 4.9 yards per carry. Elite numbers.

Wilson absolutely could establish himself as a top-10 running back in the NFL is he stays healthy.

Today, I asked Kyle Shanahan what makes Wilson special and unique. Here's what Shanahan said: "He doesn't mess around. He knows himself. He puts his foot down and goes forward. You look at that long run he had versus the Rams and the one that he had in the first quarter against Carolina, he gets a big lane, but a lot of people get a big lane and they see that one guy left and they start to stop set up a really big move to make that guy miss -- you don't even see Jeff make a move, because he just goes to space and takes it right away and changes the angle of the defender. He plays so fast and hits it so hard, usually he gets a little more than you block it for."

What an endorsement.

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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