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49ers HC Kyle Shanahan Explains Why He Stopped Using Jordan Mason

The 49ers have one of the most dangerous running backs in the NFL this season, and Kyle Shanahan hardly uses him anymore.

Grant Cohn

Oct 27, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan looks on after the first down by the Dallas Cowboys during the third quarter at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Neville E. Guard-Imagn Images
Oct 27, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan looks on after the first down by the Dallas Cowboys during the third quarter at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Neville E. Guard-Imagn Images / Neville E. Guard-Imagn Images
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SANTA CLARA -- The 49ers have one of the most dangerous running backs in the NFL this season, and Kyle Shanahan hardly uses him anymore.

Jordan Mason is averaging 5.1 yards per carry. He currently is the NFL's 14th-leading rusher even though he has carried the ball just six times in the past three games.

Since Christian McCaffrey has returned from bilateral Achilles tendonitis, he's averaging a mere 3.5 yards per carry. And yet he has played 88 percent of the 49ers' offensive snaps while Mason has barely played at all.

On Wednesday, Shanahan explained his decision to feature McCaffrey and essentially shelve Mason.

“Even when Mason was going a ton, we didn't get Isaac (Guerendo) a lot (of carries)," Shanahan said. "So I mean, we're just not a big three-man-rotation team, especially when you have a solidified starter. We're not trying to get Christian off the field more. We want to keep him fresh and keep him at his best, but Christian's also a guy who gets better as he goes. He's a guy who feels a lot more comfortable being out there. I also don't think the way these games have gone, we didn't run the ball much last week at all in general. So not many people, we didn't, I think we got 14 runs. So when that's the case, you're not going on long drives, you only have 13 plays or 14 plays in the whole first half with one of them being close to a two-minute drive, the other's being four-and-out. It's just not going to work out that way."

TRANSLATION: The 49ers spend a ton of money on McCaffrey so they can't split his carries with a running back who makes less than $1 million per season and outproduces him.

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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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