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Dave Merritt Gives a Brutal Assessment of the 49ers Offense

Here's what Merritt said.
Grant Cohn|
Dave Merritt Gives a Brutal Assessment of the 49ers Offense
Dave Merritt Gives a Brutal Assessment of the 49ers Offense

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers interviewed Chiefs defensive backs coach Dave Merritt to be their defensive coordinator. Something tells me he won't get the job.

Merritt recently did an interview in which he discussed the coach he could potentially replace as the 49ers defensive coordinator -- Steve Wilks -- as well as the 49ers' offensive performance in the Super Bowl.

Here's what Merritt said:

"Wilks is looking at this as a blessing. I understand they want to go in a different direction, but if you want to base it purely off (the Super Bowl), that's not the case and we all know that. There's always something behind a marriage if it's not going well. It doesn't just happen overnight. But if you want to talk about the game, the offense went 3 for 12 on third down. Our offense went 9 for 19. If your offense is going 3 for 12 on third down, is that Wilks' fault? If your tight end who's All Pro, (George) Kittle, only has four yards, is that Wilks' fault? You can feed (Christian) McCaffrey all you want to -- he needs help. And then No. 11, who was trying to fight all game, Ako or whatever (Brandon Aiyuk), he only had 40 something yards. Was that Wilks' fault? There was something going on before this all went down."

I'd love to think that during Merritt's interview with the 49ers, he defended Wilks and eviscerated Shanahan for his terrible offense in the Super Bowl. I'd like to think Merritt was as brutally honest to the 49ers as he was on the radio and that the 49ers listened to him and took his criticisms to heart.

Still, there's no way they're hiring him. Can you imagine what Kittle and Aiyuk must think of him right now?

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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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