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Should the 49ers Sign Todd Gurley?

The 49ers need to add another running back to their pitiful committee. Why not Gurley?
Grant Cohn|
Should the 49ers Sign Todd Gurley?
Should the 49ers Sign Todd Gurley?

The 49ers should sign Todd Gurley today.

He's a free agent, and running back currently is the weakest position on the 49ers.

Sunday against the Packers, the 49ers had rookie Trey Sermon, who was awful, plus three other former practice squad players who carried the ball a whopping zero times. The 49ers did not trust them to touch the ball on offense. Which means the 49ers had no run game.

When they had Raheem Mostert, they had a run game, because Mostert is good. The rest of the 49ers running backs are not. Even rookie Elijah Mitchell, who missed the Packers game with a shoulder injury, looks mediocre at best.

The 49ers need to add another running back to their pitiful committee. 

Why not Gurley?

Sure, he has an 80-year-old knee, but he's only 27-years old. And although he averaged merely 3.5 yards per carry for the Falcons last season, he appeared in 15 games, rushed 195 times and scored 9 touchdowns. Which means he was durable, unlike the 49ers current running backs. Plus he scored points, and points are always good.

If the 49ers were to sign Gurley, there's a legitimate chance he could lead in the team in carries, rushing yards and rushing touchdowns by the end of the season, simply because the other running backs are so injury-prone and/or terrible.

Signing Gurley would cost the 49ers next to nothing. They wouldn't have to trade for him. They simply could offer him a cheap, incentive-based deal, and see what he has left.

It couldn't hurt.

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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