All 49ers

49ers to Sign Tavon Austin?

The 49ers seemingly will make one more roster move before training camp starts this Saturday.
Grant Cohn|
49ers to Sign Tavon Austin?
49ers to Sign Tavon Austin?

The 49ers seemingly will make one more roster move before training camp starts this Saturday.

The 49ers will bring in wide receiver Tavon Austin for a workout and intend to sign him, according to the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport.

Austin, 30, played the past two seasons with the Cowboys after spending the first five seasons of his career with the Rams. He was the eighth pick in the 2013 draft, he ran a 4.34 40-yard dash at the NFL Scouting Combine and still is one of the fastest players in the NFL, even though he never has fulfilled his promise as a top-10 pick.

Austin’s final season with the Rams, 2017, also was head coach Sean McVay’s first season in Los Angeles. That year, McVay made Austin run lots of reverses and jet sweeps to enhance the Rams running game. The 49ers use similar types of plays and could use Austin the same way the Rams did. He also became somewhat of a deep threat in Dallas, where he averaged 15.1 yards per catch the past two seasons.

Austin replaces 49ers wide receiver Travis Benjamin, their designated speedster who opted out of the 2020 season due to concerns about the coronavirus. And Benjamin replaced Marquise Goodwin, the 49ers’ previous designated speedster whom they traded to the Eagles this offseason.

There’s no guarantee Austin will make the 49ers’ 53-man roster, just as there was no guarantee Benjamin would make it. But it certainly seems the 49ers want a blazingly fast wide receiver. And at the moment, Austin is the only one they have, if indeed they sign him.

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.

Share on XFollow grantcohn
Home/News