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Will the 49ers Trade for Cleveland Browns CB Greg Newsome?

The 49ers need to make a splash this offseason.
Grant Cohn|
Oct 27, 2024; Cleveland, Ohio, USA; Cleveland Browns cornerback Greg Newsome II (0) celebrates during the second half against the Baltimore Ravens at Huntington Bank Field. Mandatory Credit: Ken Blaze-Imagn Images
Oct 27, 2024; Cleveland, Ohio, USA; Cleveland Browns cornerback Greg Newsome II (0) celebrates during the second half against the Baltimore Ravens at Huntington Bank Field. Mandatory Credit: Ken Blaze-Imagn Images | Ken Blaze-Imagn Images

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers need to make a splash this offseason.

Banking on better health and an easier schedule won't be enough to catapult the 49ers back to the Super Bowl. They need to make up serious groud in the NFC to catch the Eagles, the Commanders, the Lions and the Rams. Even the Cardinals beat the 49ers twice this season.

That's why the 49ers could look to acquire a veteran impact player via trade. Bleacher Report suggests the 49ers offer their third-round compensatory pick to the Cleveland Browns in exchange for cornerback Greg Newsome.

"The Niners were middle-of-the-pack when it came to defending the pass last season," writes Bleacher Report. "Those results are going to be hard to improve if they don't take moves to retain or replace Charvarius Ward and Talanoa Hufanga. Both are impending free agents. Meanwhile, the Browns have a decision to make with their cornerback room. They have Denzel Ward, Martin Emerson and Greg Newsome. All three have been good, but paying all three of them probably isn't feasible. Newsome was the odd man out this year. He played fewer snaps and was mostly deployed in the slot. The Browns would be wise to move him for a draft pick and San Francisco could give him an opportunity to playing on the outside again."

This is a creative trade idea. The problem is that Newsome's base salary will be $13.4 million in 2025 and then he'll be a free agent. So the 49ers would be trading for an expensive one-year rental just a few months after they gave cornerback Deommodore Lenoir a lucrative multi-year extension.

The 49ers generally don't pay two cornerbacks big bucks at the same time. If they're going to sign another starting defensive back, I expect they'll sign a safety.

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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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