The 49ers Are Down Four Running Backs, Bosa Is Sore, and the Only Good News Is George Kittle
Christian McCaffrey sat out Monday with tightness, the three backs behind him are already hurt, the team spent the day auditioning strangers, and Nick Bosa hasn't been in pads in a week. Then Kittle went out and ran.
It's 10 August. The season is a month away. And on Monday the San Francisco 49ers held a limited practice without the four running backs that any of us would have named as the four running backs on this roster. Not one of them. All four.
Christian McCaffrey didn't practice. The word out of the building is tightness, which the coaching staff delivered with the standard shrug, a little sore, he's doing fine, we're managing him as we go. And look, I've been doing this long enough to know that tightness in the second week of August is usually nothing. Teams sit players in August for hangnails. If the name on the jersey were anybody else I wouldn't have typed a word about it.
But it isn't anybody else. It's Christian McCaffrey, and this fan base has been conditioned like a lab animal. We've watched an entire season of this man evaporate over something that started as a calf and became an Achilles and became a year. We've heard managing his workload before. So no, the word tightness doesn't scare me. The name attached to it does, and if you tell me you feel differently I don't believe you.
Now the rest of the room, because this is the part that's genuinely absurd. Kaelon Black, the rookie, has been off to the side for a while with an adductor, groin, in the language people actually use. Jordan James is out with broken ribs, cracked in late July when Fred Warner went to punch the ball out in practice, which is the single most 49ers sentence of this entire camp. Our own All-Pro linebacker broke our own running back. And Isaac Guerendo has been gone since before camp opened with a torn pectoral.
Four deep. Gone. So the 49ers did what a team does when it looks up and finds the position group empty: they went shopping on a Monday. Tryouts for Nyheim Miller-Hines and Zamir White, plus a visit with Blake Watson, an undrafted kid out of Memphis who ran a 4.39 and jumped 41 and a half inches at his pro day. That isn't a panic move and I'm not going to pretend it is. It's wear and tear insurance, bodies to take carries so the ones you care about don't have to. Every team does it. It's just that most teams aren't doing it because their entire depth chart is in the training room in the second week of August.
Credit where it's owed: Patrick Taylor Jr and Sincere McCormick have been eating in this camp, Khalil Herbert has been getting real work, and Deebo Samuel took snaps at running back on Monday because of course he did. That's the one thing this organisation is genuinely good at, finding a functional body and handing it the ball. It doesn't make me feel better about September.
Here's the one that actually worries me, and it isn't a running back. Nick Bosa hasn't been in pads. He hasn't been going through individual work. Three straight open sessions now, and what the team is calling it's soreness. General soreness. That's the entire explanation. Ask for specifics and you get the same word again.
Soreness in a knee that had its ACL reconstructed after Week 3 of last season. I'm not going to sit here and manufacture an emergency out of a word, Bosa was never playing a preseason snap anyway, Warner isn't playing one either, and I'd be stunned if Dre Greenlaw sees the field on Thursday. None of these guys need August. But hasn't been padded up, hasn't done individual is a different sentence from we're being careful, and this organisation has a long and well documented history of the second sentence quietly becoming the first one in October. Put it in the back of your mind. Don't set off the alarm yet. Just leave your hand near it.
And then, finally, something good. Genuinely good.
George Kittle was out on the practice field before practice and he looked like George Kittle. Running. Running hard. Making cuts, real ones, not the tentative jogging-in-a-straight-line stuff you see from a guy protecting a leg. This is a man who tore his Achilles in the playoff win over the Eagles and had it surgically repaired shortly after, and four months later he's out there moving like the injury is a story somebody told him about.
Nobody in the building is going to say the words out loud yet, and they have the GPS data that says whatever it says about his top speed and how hard he's cutting. But watching it? I wouldn't rule out Week 1. I'm not promising Week 1. I'm saying that if you had asked me in February whether Kittle would be on the field in Melbourne against the Rams on 10 September, I'd have laughed and started thinking about October. Now I'm not laughing. A lot depends on the next four weeks, and Melbourne is a brutal place to make your season debut, fourteen thousand miles, a date line, a divisional opponent, but he's trending toward it, and after the Monday we just had I'm taking every scrap of good news I can get.
That's the state of this thing a month out. The best running back in football is sore, the three behind him are broken, strangers are auditioning at Levi's on a Monday afternoon, the best defensive player on the roster hasn't put pads on in a week, and the one unambiguously encouraging development is a tight end coming back from a ruptured Achilles. That isn't a camp. That's a triage tent. And we've written this column on this site so many Augusts running that the file practically writes itself now.
Thursday is the preseason opener against Tennessee, Kyle Shanahan is coaching it himself, and you'll see approximately none of the players discussed above. The roster picture is on the depth chart page, the rest of the year is in the season schedule hub, the structural read is in the season preview, and everything else lives on the 49ers hub. Thirty-one days. Somebody get this team a running back.
Update, 12 August: they got one. Zamir White signed a one-year deal two days after that tryout, and to clear the room for him and two other veterans the 49ers waived Junior Bergen, Jack Bouwmeester and K.J. Henry.
Update, August 17. A week later he still hasn't practiced, and no injury has been attached to his name. There's a real chance this is about a contract, and Nick Bosa hasn't been out there either.
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