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REPORT: 49ers Prepared to Make Robert Saleh the NFL's Highest-Paid DC

“It’s Robert Saleh or bust."
Grant Cohn|
East Rutherford, NJ -- August 10, 2024 -- Jets head coach Robert Saleh in the first half as the Washington Commanders came to MetLife Stadium to play the New York Jets in the first preseason game of the 2024 season.
East Rutherford, NJ -- August 10, 2024 -- Jets head coach Robert Saleh in the first half as the Washington Commanders came to MetLife Stadium to play the New York Jets in the first preseason game of the 2024 season. | Chris Pedota / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

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San Francisco 49ers

It's Friday, January 17, 2025, and the 49ers still haven't hired a defensive coordinator to replace Nick Sorensen.

And that's because the 49ers seem to be waiting for one candidate -- former New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh. He was the 49ers' defensive coordinator from 2017 to 2020 and is their preferred choice to fill the position this year according to The Athletic's Matt Barrows.

“It’s Robert Saleh or bust, really," Barrows said recently. "Because they haven’t done much work with anybody else to this point. I’ve heard that they already told Saleh, 'We will make you the highest-paid defensive coordinator in all the land if you sign with us.' So now it’s just a matter of waiting for Saleh."

This is a risky game for the 49ers to play.

They're banking that Robert Saleh won't get hired as a head coach this offseason. But he currently has drawn interest from three teams that have head-coaching vacancies -- the Jaguars, the Raiders and the Cowboys. Saleh most likely will wait for those teams to make their decisions before he gets back to the 49ers with a decision of his own. So this process could take a while.

If Saleh were to get hired as a head coach three weeks from now, all the good defensive coordinators could be gone by then and the best candidate left could be 49ers assistant head coach Brandon Staley. Talk about a nightmare.

Hopefully, the 49ers know what they're doing.

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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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