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The 49ers Must Re-Sign Jason Verrett

You could argue Jason Verrett is the MVP of the 49ers defense this season.
Grant Cohn|
The 49ers Must Re-Sign Jason Verrett
The 49ers Must Re-Sign Jason Verrett

You could argue Jason Verrett is the MVP of the 49ers defense this season.

Not the best player -- that's middle linebacker Fred Warner. But Verrett perhaps is even more valuable than Warner, because Verrett can cover the best wide receivers in the NFL, such as Arizona Cardinals wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins, and shut them down.

Verrett shut down Hopkins this past Saturday during the 49ers' 20-12 win over Arizona. In fact, Verrett was the biggest difference between the 49ers' win over Arizona and their Week 1 loss. In that game, the score was 24-20. The 49ers scored the same amount of points in both games, but gave up 12 fewer points the second time around.

Verrett didn't play Week 1 -- the starting cornerbacks were Richard Sherman and Emmanuel Moseley. And Sherman doesn't cover man to man. Moseley tried, but he's not good enough to stop Hopkins -- few cornerbacks are good enough to match up with him.

Verrett clearly is one of them. He completely transformed the 49ers defense this season, and made defensive coordinator Robert Saleh's great, fresh ideas work.

Every team needs a cornerback who can cover the best wide receivers in its division. The 49ers need a cornerback who can cover Hopkins and Seahawks wide receiver D.K. Metcalf. And the 49ers didn't have a corner who could match up with them until Verrett emerged.

So the 49ers must find a way to re-sign Verrett this offseason. He should be one of their top priorities, along with left tackle Trent Williams. Because the 49ers would have to draft a cornerback in Round 1 to find someone to replace Verrett. He's that good.

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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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