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Who Will Start at Safety for the 49ers While Malik Mustapha is Out?

The 49ers won't have one of their best young players to start the season.
Grant Cohn|
Oct 20, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers safety Malik Mustapha (6) catches a pass before the start of the game against the Kansas City Chiefs at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images
Oct 20, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers safety Malik Mustapha (6) catches a pass before the start of the game against the Kansas City Chiefs at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images | Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers won't have one of their best young players to start the season.

Second-year safety Malike Mustapha tore his ACL for the second time during the 49ers' regular-season finale and most likely won't be ready to play for the first few weeks of the upcoming season. When he returns, he will be the 49ers' best safety by a wide margin. But while he's out, who will start at safety for the 49ers?

One of the starters most likely will be Ji'Ayir Brown, who played well as a rookie in 2023 -- he even intercepted Patrick Mahomes in the Super Bowl. In 2024, he was simply awful. He even got benched for Talanoa Hufanga, who signed with the Broncos this offseason. Brown will need to bounce back big time to keep this starting job.

Next to Brown, the 49ers don't have a clear-cut starter. In free agency, they signed Jason Pinnock and Richie Grant to one-year deals. Grant started 32 games for the Atlanta Falcons in 2022 and 2023 before losing his starting job in 2024, while Pinnock started 32 games the past two seasons for the New York Giants.

Both players aren't particularly good, but neither is Brown. And it's possible that defensive coordinator Robert Saleh actually prefers Grant and Pinnock to Brown considering Saleh had a hand in signing those two veterans and was not on the staff when the 49ers drafted Brown in 2023. Steve Wilks was the defensive coordinator that season, and now he's with the Jets.

Whoever the 49ers decide to start at safety, this is one of the weakest positions on the team until Mustapha returns.

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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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