Kittle Practiced, Bosa Didn't, and Nobody Will Say When Either of Them Plays

Both are supposed to be out there all three days this week. One of them was. Mike Evans caught passes on the side out of uniform, Malik Mustapha worked, Dominick Puni is out of concussion protocol, and Kittle might not even get on the plane.

Here's the plan, as it was given to us: Nick Bosa and George Kittle are both going to practice these three days. That's the whole runway before this team gets on a plane to the other side of the planet. Three days. So I did what anybody who has spent a summer refreshing injury reports does, which is count heads, and the count came back one out of two. Kittle was out there. Bosa wasn't.

I want to be careful here, because it's the first of the three and a veteran getting a day is the most normal thing in football. Bosa has had a summer of general soreness and nothing more sinister than that. But the whole point of saying the words "all three days" out loud is that the three days are supposed to happen, and day one already came in short. Nobody's panicking. It's just arithmetic, and arithmetic like that turns into a Wednesday of everybody asking each other what it means.

Day one of three. One of two.

The Kittle half is genuinely good news and I'm going to let myself enjoy about sixty percent of it. He was practicing. Actually practicing. This is a guy who tore an Achilles in January and has spent eight months turning himself back into a tight end while the rest of us pretended we weren't doing the math on Achilles recovery timelines at two in the morning. We wrote about the markers he was hitting back in Kittle's Achilles recovery, and he's kept hitting them.

The other forty percent is the part nobody's saying out loud in a straight line. It remains to be seen when he actually plays. Not when he practices. When he plays. And there's a real possibility he doesn't travel to Australia at all, which is a sentence I had to read twice, because Week 1 is in Melbourne and if he stays home he isn't missing a game, he's missing a trip that takes the better part of two days each way. You can build an argument for it. Fifteen hours in a plane seat is not rehab.

I still don't love it.

The rest of the field had things worth watching. Mike Evans was out there catching passes, out of uniform, off to the side, which is the specific in between state where a guy is fine enough to move and not fine enough to be counted. Malik Mustapha practiced, and after the year he's had that's a small win on its own. And Dominick Puni is back from concussion protocol, which matters more than it'll get credit for, because the interior of that line is the difference between Purdy having a clean pocket in September and Purdy running for his life in Australia.

So where does that leave the week? A tight end who's practicing and might not travel. An edge rusher who's supposed to practice and hasn't yet. A receiver catching balls in street clothes. Two guys back on the grass who weren't. The next two days tell you almost everything, and if Bosa is out there Tuesday nobody remembers I wrote any of this.

Melbourne is the 10th. The full slate sits on the 2026 schedule hub, the roster page has the rest of the bodies on the roster and depth chart, and everything else we've written this summer is on the 49ers hub. Ask me Tuesday.

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