Jim Harbaugh Comes Back on Thursday, and George Kittle Finally Sounds Like Himself Again
The 49ers are at SoFi on Thursday night against the man who dragged this franchise back to life and then got run out of the building. And the best news of the week has nothing to do with him.
Jim Harbaugh is on the other sideline Thursday night and I've been trying all week to decide how I feel about it. I still don't know. The 49ers are at SoFi at seven o'clock on Thursday, it's a preseason game, it means nothing, and I'm going to watch every snap of it like it's January.
Because it's him. It's the guy who walked into a building that had been irrelevant for a decade and made it terrifying inside of one season. Forty four wins, nineteen losses and a tie. Three straight NFC Championship Games. A Super Bowl that we should have won and that I still refuse to discuss in detail with anybody. He did all of that in four years, and then it ended, because of course it ended, over egos and pride and a front office that decided it would rather be right than be good.
And I'm still mad about it. Twelve years later. I'm aware of how that sounds.
So Thursday is going to be strange. He gets the handshake, he gets the nice video package, somebody at the network will use the word reunion about eleven times, and none of it changes that we spent a decade after him trying to find that exact feeling again.
Now the part that actually matters. George Kittle stood there this week and sounded like George Kittle again, and I didn't realise how badly I needed to hear it until he opened his mouth.
You remember how this started. Eleven January, the playoff game against Philadelphia, and his right Achilles went. That's the injury that used to end careers and still ends seasons, and he's thirty two years old, and every one of us did the same grim arithmetic that night about what a tight end looks like on the other side of one of those.
He has been on the physically unable to perform list all camp. He says he expects to come off it before the season. He says he's hitting the markers, that he's getting close, that he wants to be back in pads sooner rather than later. He wouldn't put a date on it, which is the correct answer and also a deeply annoying one. And the detail that got me is the speed. He's reportedly running at numbers close to where he was before the thing tore. Eight months after an Achilles.
The one honest caveat, because I've been burned by August optimism more times than I can count: the work left is calf strength, getting the repaired side back to matching the other one, and that's exactly the part nobody can rush and nobody can see from the outside. It's also the part that decides whether he's himself in December or whether he spends the year being managed. So no, he isn't playing Thursday, he shouldn't play Thursday, and if anybody at that facility even considers putting him on a field at SoFi in August for a game that doesn't count I'll drive down there personally.
Week 1 is in Australia against the Rams and that's the date he's aiming at. That's the one I care about. The full picture of who's available and who isn't is on the depth chart page, and it hasn't been a kind summer, as the state of the running back room covered in painful detail.
What Thursday is actually for. Tuesday is the part that matters more, when the two teams practise together down in El Segundo, because joint practices are where real football gets played in August and the game afterwards is mostly paperwork. Thursday is roster spots. It's the back half of the receiver room and the last three defensive line jobs and whichever young corner decides he wants to make somebody's life difficult. Watch those guys. Nothing else on that field is going to tell you anything about September.
Harbaugh, meanwhile, will do what Harbaugh does, which is treat a preseason game like a street fight and get genuinely furious about a holding call in the third quarter with his fourth string offense on the field. That isn't an act. That was never an act. It's the entire reason it worked here and the entire reason it eventually didn't.
There's also the small matter of our own head coach, who's putting himself back together after the car accident and is expected to be there for Week 1, which is its own kind of August storyline that I'd very much like to stop having. The structural read on this roster is in the season preview, the whole year is laid out in the season schedule hub, and everything else lives on the 49ers hub.
But strip all of it away and this is the week the news was good. Kittle is running and he's happy about it. The old man is coming back to town for one night. Go watch it, yell at your television about 2013 for a while, and then let the guy with the Achilles take all the time he needs.
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