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Report: Chiefs are Signing 49ers RB Elijah Mitchell for 1 Year, $3.5 Mil

The 49ers were smart to let him go.
Grant Cohn|
Nov 19, 2023; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Elijah Mitchell (25) before the game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
Nov 19, 2023; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Elijah Mitchell (25) before the game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images | Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers just lost a running back.

The Kansas City Chiefs are signing Elijah Mitchell to a one-year, $3.5 million deal according to Jordan Schultz.

The 49ers originally drafted Mitchell in Round 6 of the 2021 NFL Draft and he quickly became their starting running back. But the 49ers overused him as a rookie and his body never recovered.

Mitchell sat out all of 2024 and never has appeared in more than 11 games in a season. The 49ers were smart to let him go.

But Mitchell is a terrific running back when healthy -- his career average is 4.7 yards per carry. Maybe the Chiefs will use him differently than the 49ers did. The 49ers don't generally rotate running backs -- they give one guy the majority of the carries until he gets injured, then they give the next guy up the majority of the carries.

The Chiefs generally use a rotation of running backs. Maybe that's why they felt Mitchell was worth a one-year prove-it deal.

Still, if they wanted a backup 49ers running back, it's surprising they didn't sign Jordan Mason, who actually had a good season last year. Mason is a restricted free agent and could be more expensive to sign than Mitchell.

The 49ers might not be able to afford to keep Mason if he gets an offer from another team because they're already paying Christian McCaffrey a ton of money and are trying to save as much cash as possible.

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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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