Breaking: After being hired for a while, former Seahawks Pro Bowler K.J. Wright announced his departure./cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/71031543/1295581549.0.jpg)
K.J. Wright, a former linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks, announced on social media on Monday that he has joined the San Francisco 49ers as assistant linebackers coach.
After 11 seasons in the NFL, 10 of which were played with the Seahawks, Wright, 34, announced his retirement in July 2022. In 2021, Wright also spent a season as a player for the Las Vegas Raiders. In his coaching debut, he reunites with newly hired 49ers defensive coordinator Nick Sorensen, who coached special teams and the secondary for Pete Carroll’s Seattle team for eight seasons. After joining San Francisco’s defense team in 2022, Sorensen was just moved from passing game specialist to Steve Wilks’ position, which he held until his firing following the Super Bowl.
According to a person with knowledge of the hiring process, Wright had an interview to be part of Mike Macdonald’s staff, but the new Seahawks coach took a different route. Josh Bynes, a recently retired linebacker, was brought on by Macdonald as a linebackers coach and defensive assistant. Bynes played for Macdonald in Baltimore from 2017 to 2019 and again in 2022 throughout his 12-year NFL career.
Wright, a fourth-round selection in 2011, started for Seattle for ten years and was a part of the team that won the franchise’s lone Super Bowl in 2013. His career tackle total is third, and in 2016 he was selected to the Pro Bowl.
The linebacker position is central to how the 49ers operate defensively. Strong play there is the key to tying together pass rush and coverage. In fact, one of Kyle Shanahan’s primary stated reasons for Steve Wilks’ dismissal was that the former defensive coordinator didn’t mesh as well with the team’s linebackers as the 49ers would have liked. In former defensive coordinators Robert Saleh and DeMeco Ryans, the 49ers had a pair of leaders beyond linebackers coach Johnny Holland who specialized in connecting with players at that position. They apparently have felt the need to refortify that part of the coaching staff.
Wright was a very good NFL linebacker for a decade. In Seattle, he played under Carroll, whose defense served as the original prototype for the 49ers back when Saleh — who’d coached Wright with the Seahawks — implemented it back in 2017. So the 49ers are striving to re-root themselves in schematic and technical continuity, and that’s especially clear when this hire is paired with Sorensen.
Wright has never coached before, but the 49ers certainly remember how effectively Ryans — who was also green at the time — learned as an assistant linebackers coach under Holland. They presumably would like to see if Wright, who was known to be particularly in tune with pre-snap keys, can take a similar developmental path as a teacher. The 49ers have two second-year linebackers, Dee Winters and Jalen Graham, who are looking for tutelage as they strive to become more regular contributors.
And of course, the 49ers also have a pair of established names at linebacker, both of whom Wright is eminently familiar with.
“I’m a big fan of Fred Warner,” Wright said on his podcast earlier this year. “I’m a big fan of Dre Greenlaw.”
Wright isn’t the first ex-Seahawks player to join the 49ers. Of course, cornerback Richard Sherman famously signed with San Francisco in 2018. That was after Malcolm Smith joined the 49ers in 2017 to follow Saleh, the former Seattle staffer.
Such defections have become a staple of this NFC West rivalry, and they can be traced back to Shanahan’s respect for Seattle’s defense system when Wright played there. Shanahan liked the defense so much, in fact, that he hired Saleh as his first defensive coordinator in 2017 and makes sure that the 49ers continue running a version of it to this day.
Respect goes both ways, as illustrated by Wright in a 2023 interview with NBC Sports.
“For the most part I was pretty cool, but one thing that I did do is when I made a play, a person that I loved to look to was the San Francisco 49ers sideline — in particular, Kyle Shanahan,” Wright said. “He would wear his hat, it would be all low. He’ll just be calling his plays and I look at him. I’m like, ‘How dare you even think about running that play to my side? I know you see me. Don’t run that screen to my side.’
“When I made a play that Kyle Shanahan drew up, I let him know, ‘Yeah, I sniffed that out. Run it somewhere else.’ … He’d pretend like he don’t see me. He has his hat all low, the playbook over his face. I know he saw me. He heard me loud and clear, but he didn’t say anything back.”
It’s fair to bet that those conversations came up during Wright’s interview with Shanahan.
