49ers running back Christian McCaffrey continues to be one of the most effective players in the NFL. And it’s making him even more of a magnet for all sorts of contact.
That attention includes getting his face mask grabbed and pulled, and receiving helmet-to-helmet hits. On Monday, coach Kyle Shanahan was asked whether he believes teams are targeting McCaffrey.
“No, I don’t think they’re trying to do it,” Shanahan said. “I don’t think teams are trying to hit him in the helmet or trying to face mask him. I think people are desperate on how to bring him down. You look at the tackle versus Arizona, if that guy didn’t do all that stuff, Christian was walking in for a touchdown or carrying him in for a touchdown. When you run that hard, guys do whatever they can to get a guy down and sometimes they grab onto the face mask. The helmet-to-helmets, those are tight windows. Christian runs really good routes and our quarterback’s putting it in tight areas and those guys are committed to trying to stop it. And when that happens, it’s really hard to do without doing that. So when you’ve got such a really great player like Christian who’s fearless, guys are doing everything they can to try to stop him and sometimes when they do that, they get penalties for it.”
After taking plenty of hard hits against the Cowboys, did McCaffrey emerge without any major problems?
“Yeah, as far as my knowledge,” Shanahan said. “Talking to him after the game, he was all right and then I got no reports from the training staff today. But yeah, they were bringing it. They were ready for that game and they hit hard. They didn’t shy away from anything and it was very similar to how they were when we played him in the playoffs last year.
“Christian doesn’t shy away from anything either. I thought Christian ran so hard in that game and he tried to bring it on them every chance that he got and had some really good tough runs. There’s one in particular, I thought we were going to lose about three yards on it, he got five. There was a third-and-two that I thought was blocked for one and he ended up getting two and a half. So he did some really hard running. But those guys, definitely their safeties and their edge players, they bring it and that’s something we knew going into the game.”
It’s how the 49ers play, across the board. And it makes the risk of injury even more pronounced. The best players on the team play with reckless abandon and no regard for their own safety. With 12 regular-season games to go, it’s a reason for The Faithful to hold their breath during ever game.
