Photo by Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images
Josh Rosen’s time with the 49ers is over. You can’t even really call it an experiment, or project, because whatever it was, wasn’t going anywhere. Rosen failed to impress the 49ers since signing with the team’s practice squad last season, and stuck around on the training camp roster this year.
As first reported by NFL Network’s Mike Garafolo and confirmed to KNBR by a league source, Rosen has been waived by the team. Neither he nor Nate Sudfeld took reps either of the last two days of practice.
The 49ers confirmed the move, which was in correspondence with the addition of former Bengals, Ravens and Broncos corner Davontae Harris, who the 49ers claimed off waivers from the Ravens.
Harris is a former Bengals fifth-round pick from 2018 who has eight career starts (six with Denver in 2019) and 30 games in which he’s registered 43 tackles, four passes defensed and one forced fumble.
Rosen, meanwhile, is free to be claimed. He played the majority of the second half of the team’s first preseason game, which seemed at the time — and definitely seems now — like a “show us that you’re worth keeping around”-type opportunity. Clearly, he did not show enough, going 10-of-15 for 93 yards and one egregious interception.
Rosen was criticized pretty sternly by head coach Kyle Shanahan on August 8 when asked how Rosen’s camp has been.
“I think he started off real well,” Shanahan said. “I think he’s taken a couple of steps back the last few practices. You know, it was unfortunate on that. We were supposed to go to someone and we had a busted route, so then it kind of fell apart and he tried to overcompensate and he made a bad situation worse.”
After Saturday’s game, when asked about Shanahan’s criticism and how he takes criticism in general, Rosen paused for nearly 10 seconds before answering the following. His first response was to mention how limited his reps are in practice. Rosen declined to comment specifically on how he takes criticism:
“I don’t really get many reps in practice, so you just have to sort of whether the emotional roller coaster when one or two out of your three throws in live team reps aren’t very good, so you definitely have to mentally work on keeping sort of a calm head,” Rosen said.”
The best quarterbacks in the game are so good because they’re so disciplined in making their reads, and they check the ball down when they need to and they take completions when it’s there and sometimes if you’re in a competition, you only get two or three throws a day, you just can’t, like, do something to try and show off, you just have to say stays disciplined. If your four throws of the day are going to be two to the back and two in the flats or something like that, then that’s what it’s got to be, so just trying to learn the offense and get used to it and take advantage of every opportunity.”
Shanahan had pointed out in camp that Rosen and Sudfeld “have the toughest situation” among all players because reps are so limited. He said he hoped to see them separate from each other in game reps, and it seems Rosen separated himself from Sudfeld… just not in the way he would have hoped.