SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Kris Kocurek was late — very late — to the San Francisco 49ers’ annual post-NFL Draft party in April. Evan Anderson was the reason.
The team had given Anderson, a nose tackle out of Florida Atlantic University, a late-round grade and had hosted him on a pre-draft visit. When the 49ers didn’t take a defensive lineman with any of their seven picks, they made Anderson their gotta-get-him target among the players who weren’t drafted.
The problem was that 14 other teams had the same idea, especially the New England Patriots, Miami Dolphins and Sunday’s opponent, the Seattle Seahawks.
“It was one of the most intense recruitment processes of an undrafted free agent I’ve ever been a part of,” Kocurek, the 49ers’ defensive line coach, said this week. “Because we really wanted him bad, and we had a lot of competition. And there was a lot of back and forth. And at one point it looked like we were gonna lose him.”
The 49ers, however, never let him off the line. Kocurek and two members of the scouting department worked the phones in the draft room, negotiating with the agent and urging Anderson to come to San Francisco. They increased their contract guarantee to $280,000, more than double what their top free-agent target got last year. And when the trio finally showed up at the party nearly two hours later, it had good news: It had landed its big fish.
So far Anderson has been worth the effort. He made one of the game’s biggest plays Sunday when, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers seemingly headed for a go-ahead touchdown with under a minute to go, he slipped beneath the pads of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers center and pulled down running back Rachaad White for a 3-yard loss, forcing Tampa Bay to settle for a short field goal.
Ok rookie 👏
📺 #SEAvsSF is next on FOX pic.twitter.com/1YD4vK6OQ5
— San Francisco 49ers (@49ers) November 12, 2024
Brock Purdy, Ricky Pearsall and Jauan Jennings got credit for engineering a rapid-fire drive that set up the game-winning kick as time expired. But the sequence essentially started with Anderson’s stop.
“It was huge,” Nick Bosa said. “They’d gotten him on a kind of ticky-tacky hands-to-the-face (penalty) before that. And then he comes back and makes a huge play. I’ve been impressed with him all year, and I’m happy he’s getting some good playing time now.”
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The Anderson who arrived at FAU in 2020 wouldn’t have appealed to the 49ers. There was too much of him — 377 pounds, to be exact.
Head coach Tom Herman, who’d arrived before the 2023 season, noted that the team takes photos of its players every offseason — “In underwear, kind of like what they wear at the combine” — to show their progression.
“You should see the before-and-after pictures,” Herman said. “He was a sloppy, sloppy 18-year-old and has really reshaped his body.”
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Anderson dropped more than 40 pounds before his sophomore season alone, and as the weight came off, his natural athleticism emerged. After all, this was someone who can dunk a basketball, who executed an impressive front flip into a backyard pool when his deal with the 49ers was completed and who played lacrosse in high school. Talk about imposing — he was a 350-pound long-pole defenseman who once checked an opponent so hard that the kid ended up with a fractured skull.
“I got suspended for two games,” Anderson recalled. “I didn’t even hit him illegally. But how it looked — they just had to call it because it was such a big impact and his helmet came off. They were like, ‘It had to be something illegal.’”
Herman coached at Houston and Texas before FAU, and before the draft, he told NFL scouts that Anderson was as good as any of the players he’d seen at those schools.
“I’ve coached some pretty good nose guards in Poona Ford, Ed Oliver,” he said. “And I told them, ‘The twitch. If Ed Oliver’s twitch is a 10 out of 10, (Anderson’s) is about a nine. It’s pretty damn good. But he’s just so much bigger than those two guys.”
Anderson was so impressive last season that the Owls tweaked their four-man front to give him more one-on-one matchups he could exploit. The strategy worked. He finished with 57 tackles and 18 quarterback pressures, and he even blocked a field goal.
Herman doesn’t know why Anderson fell out of the draft. It might be related to the Jones fracture he suffered as a junior. Anderson might have tried to come back too quickly, and his play dipped as a result. But by his senior year, the foot had healed, Anderson was in good shape again and he kept making plays in the run-up to the season.
“He’s the only nose guard I’ve been around where we kind of invented some defensive fronts so we could play with our four-down rules but still have him go one-on-one with the center,” Herman said. “It’s pretty cool to kind of have defenses designed around your nose guard. His ability to get from point A to point B when that ball twitches off the center’s hand is remarkable.”
Florida Atlantic’s staff adjusted its defense to create more one-on-one matchups for the dominant Evan Anderson. (Courtesy of Florida Atlantic)
Kocurek and scout Crowley Hanlon, who cross-checks the defensive linemen in the draft, saw the same thing. Which is why Anderson vaulted to the top of their target list when the draft ended and he was still available.
Kocurek went into the offseason pining for someone like D.J. Jones, whom the 49ers drafted in the sixth round in 2017 but who didn’t take off until Kocurek arrived in San Francisco two years later.
Jones, now with the Denver Broncos, was just a little over 6 feet 1 and weighed 319 pounds when he was drafted. Anderson is a hair over 6-1 and had dropped to 320 pounds for the recent draft. Both were college nose tackles who were asked to play a lot differently — defend multiple gaps — than what Kocurek wanted.
But in both players, Kocurek saw the quickness and tremendous lower body strength for exploding off the snap and through gaps — just like what Anderson did at the end of the game in Tampa.
Said Kocurek: “Just watching Evan on his college tape, he reminded me a little bit of my early days — when I first got here in 2019 — of working with D.J. and some of the things D.J. and I went through to hone in on the technique and hone in on exactly where we wanted to get his body and his weight and all that stuff. He’s a guy who just kept reminding me of D.J.”
Kocurek cautioned that it’s early and that Anderson still has plenty to learn.
“When we first started way back in rookie minicamp, he didn’t even know how to get into an attack stance,” he said.
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And the 49ers probably didn’t plan for him to play this early. When Anderson was deciding on which team to choose, one of the downsides to joining the 49ers was that they had so many interior defensive linemen: Javon Hargrave, Maliek Collins, Jordan Elliott, Kevin Givens, Kalia Davis and Yetur Gross-Matos, who can play defensive end and defensive tackle. Other teams offered a more direct path to a spot on the 53-man roster.
But all of those players landed on the injury report at some point early in the season, prompting the 49ers to temporarily elevate Anderson from the practice squad twice early in the season and to promote him for good Oct. 23. At age 22, he’s the second-youngest player on the roster — safety Malik Mustapha is younger by four months — and appears to be the cherry on top of a promising draft class.
Bosa, for instance, paid Anderson a high compliment when he said he was “the most mature, on-it rookie that I’ve been around.”
“It’s the way he works,” he said. “He’s so intentful with every single rep and every single walk-through that he has no other option other than to get better.”
He’s also a good fit with Kocurek.
Kocurek and director of player personnel Tariq Ahmad took him to dinner when he arrived in Santa Clara on a pre-draft visit, and those two — along with Hanlon — refused to let him off the phone when the draft ended.
The $280,000 guarantee certainly helped, but Anderson said Kocurek and his history of shaping defensive linemen like Jones is what finally swung it to the 49ers.
“It was coach Kris,” he said. “I liked what he was telling me, and I liked the progress of the players he’s coached, how he helped them get better.”
(Top photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
