Eighty-Three Of Jacob Cowing's Eighty-Six Return Yards Came On One Play

Jacob Cowing fielded a punt at the San Francisco 17 late in the first half on Thursday, won the race to the left edge and ran 83 yards to the end zone. It is the best special teams play the 49ers have made this August and it is not close.

It is also almost everything he has done as a returner. The official game book for the August 20 game at the Chargers credits Cowing with two punt returns for 86 yards, a long of 83, and one touchdown. Subtract the touchdown and the other return went three yards.

Those two are the only punt returns he has this preseason. He does not appear in the August 13 game book against Tennessee at all. San Francisco returned four punts that night for 18 yards, three of them by Will Pauling and one by Jordan Watkins.

His receiving line at the Chargers was two catches on seven targets for 14 yards. Deebo Samuel took two punt-return reps before Cowing got one and neither produced anything: the first rolled into the end zone and the second he fair caught (Matt Maiocco, NBC Sports Bay Area, August 20, 10:14pm PT; Patrick Holloway, Yahoo Sports, August 22).

So the case is one play, and the honest version of the case says so out loud.

He has held this job before, for a full season, and nothing like this happened#

Cowing is not being considered for a job he has never done. He returned 28 punts for San Francisco as a rookie in 2024, for 245 yards, an average of 8.8, with a long of 30 and no touchdowns (ESPN's player file, read August 23).

Then he missed all of 2025 with a hamstring, and the club spent a seventh-round pick on a returner while he was gone.

So the NFL file reads 28 returns that never produced anything longer than 30 yards, a lost season, and then 83 yards on a Thursday night in August. The staff deciding this is the same staff that watched the 28. That is a great deal more information than the one return offers, and it does not point where the highlight points.

The club already answered this question once this month#

San Francisco waived Junior Bergen on August 12. He was a seventh-round pick in 2025, taken 252nd, and the reason the club spent the pick was that he had returned eight punts for touchdowns at Montana, which ties the FCS record. He lasted one training camp. The Jets signed him a week later, on August 19 (Erik C. Anderson, Heavy, August 19).

Eight days after San Francisco let him go, Cowing ran one back. That is the question in front of the club with seven days on the clock: whether return work is worth a seat on a 53-man roster to this staff. The only evidence on the record says no, and it is three weeks old.

What the head coach said, and what he did not#

Kyle Shanahan afterwards: "I like that he's making it easier." He was talking about the roster decision, and he did not say the return job was settled.

He also gave the play its full context rather than only its highlight. "I thought it was huge," Shanahan said. "He lost the first one in the light, which was a big disappointment. So I got a little frustrated there, but he lost it, and he definitely redeemed himself on the next one." The 49ers punt returner lost a punt in the stadium lights and then took the next one 83 yards, in that order, in the same game. (Kirk Larrabee, 49ers Webzone, August 21, 12:24am PT)

Cowing, asked about the job that night: "At the end of the day, we're still in training camp. There's still guys that are battling. At the same time, we also have guys who are very good at punt returning as well."

The arithmetic he is actually up against#

Larrabee, writing that night, put the room at Mike Evans, Deebo Samuel, Christian Kirk, Jordan Watkins, Demarcus Robinson and Stribling, and wrote that Cowing's spot "was in question at first" against that depth. Stribling leads the team with 11 catches for 109 yards through two preseason games (Maiocco, NBC Sports Bay Area, August 22). Ricky Pearsall has been on injured reserve since August 1, per the club's own transaction log, which makes him ineligible for the initial 53 and keeps him out of this math entirely.

Count it and the last seat is the one Cowing is standing in, with Watkins, Trenton Irwin, Malik Turner, KhaDarel Hodge and Pauling behind him. He was standing in it before the return, too. The return did not create the opening. It made him harder to move out of.

The thing worth watching is not whether he is exciting. It is whether this staff values a returner enough to spend a seat on one, and the Bergen decision is the only evidence on the record about how it answers that question. It answered no on August 12, about a player whose entire case was returns.

The drought is real and it is still standing#

The last San Francisco punt return for a touchdown in a game that counted was Ted Ginn Jr., 55 yards, at 3:05 of the fourth quarter against Seattle on September 11, 2011, in a 33 to 17 win. The scoring summary has him taking a kickoff back 102 yards at 3:56 of the same quarter, which is 51 seconds of game clock between the two.

Cowing's return was a preseason game, so it does not touch that. Yahoo Sports put it in the conditional and put it correctly on August 22: the 49ers "would have their first punt return for a touchdown since 2011" if he does it when the games count. Fifteen years is a long time and it is mostly a fact about how rarely punt returns score in the NFL at all, rather than a fact about San Francisco. It is still fifteen years.

Which is the part that makes the roster question interesting rather than sentimental. The man best placed to end the longest-running gap on this team's special teams may not be on the team in seven days, and the club spent August demonstrating that it does not consider return work a reason to keep somebody.

What settles it: Thursday at Allegiant Stadium, 5:00pm PT, and then the roster at 3:00pm PT on Sunday. If Cowing fields punts in Las Vegas and Deebo Samuel does not, that is the staff answering the question in the only language that resolves it before the deadline.