49ers Re-Sign K'Waun Williams to a One-Year Deal

The 49ers have re-signed every free agent they wanted to keep.
On Wednesday, they re-signed nickelback K'Waun Williams to a one-year, according to the NFL Network's Ian Rapoport. The terms of the deal have not yet been reported.
When free agency started, many experts expected Williams and the rest of the 49ers free-agent defensive backs to follow former 49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh to the Jets. But none of them have.
Instead, the 49ers re-signed Williams, Jason Verrett, Emmanuel Moseley and Jaquiski Tartt. And now the 49ers starting secondary is set for 2021.
The only former starters who won't return next season are Ahkello Witherspoon, who signed a one-year deal with the Seahawks, and Richard Sherman, who has said he doesn't play to return to Santa Clara. And it doesn't seem like the 49ers wanted either to return.
Which means the 49ers kept the defensive backs they valued, and discarded the ones they didn't care about.
And it's easy to see why the 49ers value Williams. In four seasons with the 49ers, he has forced 7 fumbles, intercepted 3 passes and recorded 4 sacks. He's a playmaker -- the biggest one in the 49ers defensive backfield. The guy most likely to take the ball away from the opposing offense.
Williams will turn 30 in July. He missed eight games last season, and has missed at least one game every season of his career. So he's not exactly dependable.
But the 49ers aren't paying him to be dependable. They're paying him to give what he has left in the tank. If he plays only eight games, fine -- he's cheap. And he if he plays a full season, wonderful.
One way or another, next season probably will be the final season for Williams in Santa Clara.
Make it count, K'Waun.

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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