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The 49ers Made One of the NFL's Best Moves this Offseason

The 49ers made one of the best moves in the NFL this offseason and no one gives them any credit for it.
Grant Cohn|
May 9, 2025; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, right, confers with defensive coordinator Robert Saleh during the teamís rookie minicamp. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images
May 9, 2025; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, right, confers with defensive coordinator Robert Saleh during the teamís rookie minicamp. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images | D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers made one of the best moves in the NFL this offseason and no one gives them any credit for it.

I'm not talking about Brock Purdy's extension or George Kittle's extension or Fred Warner's extension or the Bryce Huff trade or the Deebo Samuel trade. All of those moves were fine in their own right, but none of them was the 49ers' best move.

Bleacher Report recently came out with an article that ranked the NFL's top 25 moves of the offseason, and nothing the 49ers did made the cut. Meanwhile, the Raiders trading for 34-year-old Geno Smith was the third-best move of the offseason, according to the article.

Meanwhile, the 49ers fired defensive coordinator Nick Sorensen and replaced him with Robert Saleh. Sorensen was one of the worst defensive coordinators in the NFL -- he currently coaches special teams for the Dallas Cowboys. He might never coach defense again. Meanwhile, Saleh probably is a top 3 or 5 defensive coordinator in the league plus he has four years of head-coaching experience. He's better than the first time he was with the 49ers.

Upgrading from Sorensen to Saleh is like upgrading from Gardner Minshew to Joe Burrow at quarterback. That's how much better than Sorensen Saleh really is. So no matter what you think of the 49ers' rookies or the players they lost in free agency, you can bet that the defense will be better this year than it was last year simply because Saleh is coaching it.

That's a great move.

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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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