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Fred Warner Explains Why He Loves 49ers DC Robert Saleh

This bodes well for the 49ers' draft this year.
Grant Cohn|
Sep 9, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh (left) greets San Francisco 49ers linebacker Fred Warner (right) after the game at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
Sep 9, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh (left) greets San Francisco 49ers linebacker Fred Warner (right) after the game at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images | Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images

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San Francisco 49ers

Fred Warner is a future Hall of Fame middle linebacker.

But when he came out of BYU, he fell to Round 3 because most NFL talent evaluators believed he was too soft to play in the box. Wasn't cut out for the physicality of the league. After all, he essentially played nickelback in college.

Only Robert Saleh had the vision of what Warner would become. And that's why the 49ers drafted Warner.

Now Saleh is back on the 49ers as their defensive coordinator. On Wednesday, Warner appeared on The Pat McAfee Show and discussed how he feels about Saleh's return.

"I love Saleh, love everything about him," Warner said. "The draft process is horrible unless you're the first overall pick or something, I don't know how it is for those guys in the first round. They might get talked up, but for a guy like me who was trying to prove himself, I was a third-round draft pick and I had a bunch of teams telling me, 'You can't do this, you're not that.' Finally, I took my 30 visit with the Niners and I'm in there with Coach Saleh in his office, and he was like, 'Man, I really like your game, this is how I see you playing in our system.' This was the first time I was hearing these things. So I was thinking this guy Coach Saleh, he's the best. Then they drafted me and had all the belief in the world to stay with me even through a rocky rookie season as a starter and see it through. I love him. Happy to be back with him.

What I find most interesting about this story is how involved Saleh is with drafting defensive players. It sounds like the 49ers took Warner specifically because Saleh liked him.

This bodes well for the 49ers' draft this year.

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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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