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The 49ers Should Draft Cam Skattebo to Replace Kyle Juszczyk

Watch for the 49ers to target Skattebo in Round 3.
Grant Cohn|
Dec 7, 2024; Arlington, TX, USA; Arizona State Sun Devils running back Cam Skattebo (4) in action during the game between the Iowa State Cyclones and the Arizona State Sun Devils at AT&T Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jerome Miron-Imagn Images
Dec 7, 2024; Arlington, TX, USA; Arizona State Sun Devils running back Cam Skattebo (4) in action during the game between the Iowa State Cyclones and the Arizona State Sun Devils at AT&T Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jerome Miron-Imagn Images | Jerome Miron-Imagn Images

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers need to find a replacement for Kyle Juszczyk this offseason.

Juszczyk will be 34 in April, he's entering the final season of his contract and his salary-cap number this year is $6.49 million, which is astronomical for a fullback. Trent Williams is the only offensive lineman on the team who has a higher cap number than Juszczyk this year. Which is weird, because Juszczyk essentially is an undersized pulling guard. He's not a running threat and he catches fewer than 20 passes per season. Neither his skill set nor production are worth the money the 49ers pay him. It's time for him to go.

Which means the 49ers need to draft a fullback to replace him because fullback is an important position to Kyle Shanahan. He wants to have a fullback on the field for roughly 50 percent of the offensive snaps because a fullback provides the offense the ability to execute many more blocking combinations and concepts than a second tight end or a third wide receiver does.

Here's the problem for the 49ers: fullback essentially is a dead position. College football doesn't produce NFL fullbacks the way it did 40 years ago because college football doesn't use fullbacks. It mostly features spread offenses.

So the 49ers will have to draft someone and convert him to fullback. Juszczyk was a tight end in college and the Ravens drafted him and converted him to fullback.

The 49ers should draft Arizona State running back Cam Skattebo and convert him to fullback. He's built like a fullback, he runs like a fullback and he can catch passes, too -- he had 605 receiving yards this season. He's better than Juszczyk right now at everything except blocking, and Skattebo can improve that area of his game which already is good.

Watch for the 49ers to target Skattebo in Round 3.

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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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