The San Francisco 49ers are moving on from Nick Sorensen, a league source said Tuesday, marking the second straight year they’ve parted ways with their defensive coordinator after one season.
The 49ers hope they can retain Sorensen on staff in some capacity, the source said. The team has an opening at special teams coordinator and Sorensen was a special teams coordinator in Jacksonville in 2021.
Per a league source, the 49ers are moving on from Nick Sorensen at defensive coordinator. The team hopes it can retain Sorensen in some capacity. … The 49ers have an opening at special teams coordinator and Sorensen was a special team coordinator in Jacksonville in 2021.
— Matt Barrows (@mattbarrows) January 8, 2025
A year ago, it was clear that Steve Wilks was an awkward fit. He didn’t have a background in the system the 49ers ran, he arrived without any assistants and there were signs during the season that he might not last long.
Sorensen, 46, was the opposite — someone well-versed in the Seattle Seahawks-style defense the 49ers prefer and a San Francisco assistant already familiar with the coaching staff and personnel.
One big obstacle was a beat-up roster that featured one linebacker, Fred Warner, who played most of the season with a broken bone in his ankle, and another, Dre Greenlaw, who came back from an Achilles rupture and was only able to play one game. Other prominent defenders like Nick Bosa, Charvarius Ward and Talanoa Hufanga also missed multiple games for various reasons.
Something else working against Sorensen: He may not have been coach Kyle Shanahan’s first choice to succeed Wilks.
The 49ers looked into hiring then-New York Jets coordinator Jeff Ulbrich but were rebuffed. Ulbrich, a former 49ers linebacker who has been on the same staff as Shanahan, later was made the Jets’ interim coach when Robert Saleh was fired in October. Both Saleh, who served as San Francisco’s defensive coordinator from 2017 and 2020, and Ulbrich are available this offseason.
The 49ers defense hasn’t been awful in either of the last two years. In fact, it’s ranked in the top 10 in yards allowed in both of those seasons.
But the unit lagged in key areas, including in areas that had been the 49ers’ calling card in recent years.
Entering Week 12 in Green Bay, for example, the 49ers hadn’t allowed an individual 100-yard rusher in 44 straight contests. The Packers’ Aaron Jones rushed for 108 yards that day in a 38-10 blowout and four of the 49ers’ next six opponents also had a 100-yard rusher. While the Arizona Cardinals did not in Sunday’s season finale, they rushed for 151 yards as a team and averaged 5.6 yards per carry while hanging 47 points on Sorensen’s unit.
Takeaways also were hard to come by in the second half of the season, which had to be galling to Sorensen considering he ran their weekly takeaway meeting the previous year. The 49ers had just two — an interception and a fumble recovery — after their Week 9 bye. They were minus-3 in the turnover margin in Sunday’s 47-24 loss in Arizona.
“It’s not good enough,” Sorensen said on Jan. 2. “It’s hard to win games when you’re in the minus all the time or you’re just not taking the ball away. We haven’t done our part there pretty much half the season.”
Sorensen’s unit also didn’t finish with a flourish, giving up 40 points to the Detroit Lions in Week 17 with two lapses on fourth down and another on a two-point conversion by Detroit, and the 47 points to the Cardinals.
“I felt like our communications were getting better and then we had another breakdown in a critical moment,” Sorensen said after the loss to the Lions. “The one thing I will say, I think the guys played hard all year. They have. … That’s the one part that I can see is consistently, our guys have played tough, they’ve played violent and they’ve played hard.”
Required reading
(Photo: Sergio Estrada / Imagn Images)
