49ers All-Pro Calls Out Team Reporter for 'Hanging Around Our Lockers While We're Changing'

It's not usually a good look for NFL players to get into personal fracases with the reporters covering the team. But 49ers players have long held a grudge against one particular reporter--SI.com's Grant Cohn--and that tradition continued on Friday.

Throughout the last few seasons, the NFL players association, as well as the league and the Pro Football Writers of America guild, have sought to work out ways to accommodate reporters, who have had access to the team locker room for interviews going back about a century. But the players want reporters out of the locker room, and the unions has continued to push the issue.

So when the NFLPA put out a statement urging the league to take action and move interviews outside the locker room, one 49ers star--eight-time Pro Bowl full back Kyle Juszczyk--took aim at Cohn, whose reputation as a thorn in the team's side is established.

"Maybe we can keep @grantcohn from always hanging around our lockers while we’re changing," Juszczyk wrote on Twitter/X.

Cohn, the son of longtime Bay Area columnist Lowell Cohn (who engendered controversy himself when he suggested the 49ers should cut Colin Kaepernick in 2016), later wrote on Twitter/X , "I'm starting to think certain players on the 49ers don't like me."

There is a case to be made there. It was also pointed out on Twitter/X that 49ers players frequently steamroll past Cohn's questions in interviews, with a video of Deebo Samuel doing just that.

Whether the disdain for one reporter by a team of NFL millionaires is justified depends on the eye of the beholder, of course. From the 49ers' perspective, some incidents stood out in the past, like Cohn's takedown of Brock Purdy--"It's over for Brock, his Cinderella story is over!"--which was followed by a declaration that, "This team is not going to the Super Bowl!"

That was just last year, when Purdy was a Pro Bowler who went on to lead the league in quarterback rating and got the 49ers ultimately ... to the Super Bowl.

There was, also, a profanity-laced livestream back in 2022 with 49ers defensive lineman Javon Kinlaw, which set into a motion an ugly back-and-forth that eventually required GM John Lynch's intervention.

To some, no doubt, Cohn is simply holding the team and its players to account. To others, he is an agitator more interested in self-promotion than reporting on the team. To the 49ers and, clearly, to Juszczyk, he's a guy they'd like to not have in the locker room.