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Pro Football Focus Ranks the 49ers' Roster 14th out of 32 NFL Teams

So much can change in 12 months.

Grant Cohn

Dec 1, 2024; Orchard Park, New York, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey (23) warms up before a game against the Buffalo Bills at Highmark Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Mark Konezny-Imagn Images
Dec 1, 2024; Orchard Park, New York, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey (23) warms up before a game against the Buffalo Bills at Highmark Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Mark Konezny-Imagn Images / Mark Konezny-Imagn Images
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So much can change in 12 months.

At this time last year, Pro Football Focus ranked the 49ers' roster No. 1 out of 32 NFL teams. But after losing 11 games last season, missing the playoffs and losing 9 starters in free agency, their roster isn't nearly as talented or deep as it was a year ago.

That's why Pro Football Focus just ranks the 49ers' roster 14th among 32 teams.

"The team traded Deebo Samuel this offseason and has several questions to answer on defense," write PFF's Max Chadwick and Dalton Wasserman.

The return of Robert Saleh will help, but a defense starting up to six rookies almost certainly will go through growing pains. So it's hard to expect Saleh's unit to be the driving force of a playoff team in 2025.

That's why PFF says Christian McCaffrey is the 49ers' X-factor this year.

"Dealing with a litany of lower-body injuries, McCaffrey was essentially a non-factor in San Francisco’s 2024 season," write Chadwick and Wasserman. "He posted a career-high 90.3 PFF rushing grade in 2023, but he now enters his age-29 season with serious question marks. If McCaffrey is healthy, the 49ers have a playoff-worthy offense. If not, they could be too one-dimensional to compete with the NFC's top contenders."

Even if McCaffrey is healthy this year, he may no longer have the quickness and burst to be an elite player. Last year, he forced just five missed tackles in four games and topped out at 17.4 miles per hour. And he was fully after carefully coming back from bilateral Achilles tendonitis. And then he tore his PCL after just four games.

It seems unlikely to expect McCaffrey to carry the offense like he used to.

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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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