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Was Releasing Arik Armstead a Mistake?

The 49ers are banking on Armstead to continue missing time, and if he does, the 49ers won't regret releasing him. But if he stays healthy in 2024, the 49ers would have released him for nothing.
Grant Cohn|
Was Releasing Arik Armstead a Mistake?
Was Releasing Arik Armstead a Mistake?

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San Francisco 49ers

Plan A for the 49ers this offseason was to get Arik Armstead to take a pay cut, which didn't go so well, considering he refused.

Plan B for the 49ers this offseason was to release Armstead and replace with the little cap space they had available. First, they signed Jordan Elliott, a free agent defensive tackle the Browns didn't want anymore, to a one-year, $5 million deal. Next, the 49ers traded a seventh-round pick to the Texans for Maliek Collins, a defensive tackle Houston didn't want anymore.

So the 49ers replaced Armstead with a platoon of specialists -- Elliott is the run defender, and Collins is the pass rusher. On paper, the 49ers got the short end of this trade, because Armstead just signed a three-year, $51 million contract with the Jaguars, which means he's still much more valuable on the open market than Elliott and Collins put together. Which is remarkable, considering Armstead is much older and less durable than those two.

The 49ers are banking on Armstead to continue missing time, and if he does, the 49ers won't regret releasing him. But if he stays healthy in 2024, the 49ers would have released him for nothing.

I understand why the 49ers wanted to move on from Armstead and replace him with durable players, but they didn't improve their defensive line. If they really wanted to replace Armstead, they should do so with their first-round pick, not a couple veteran castoffs.

It seems the 49ers just got worse at defensive tackle.

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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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