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George Kittle Says the 49ers Have a Lot of Stuff to Figure Out

No one has a clearer vision of where the 49ers stand than George Kittle.

Grant Cohn

Dec 30, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle (85) warms up before the game against the Detroit Lions at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images
Dec 30, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle (85) warms up before the game against the Detroit Lions at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images / Sergio Estrada-Imagn Images
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No one has a clearer vision of where the 49ers stand than George Kittle.

He might be the smartest player on the team -- he articulates football better than the head coach. And he's a tight end, which means he's different. He's a team player, but he's also an individualist. So he can look outside of the team's lens and see things for himself.

This week, he was asked to share what he sees when he looks at the 49ers' outlook for the future.

"Right now, it's to beat the Arizona Cardinals," Kittle said. "After that, Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch will do whatever they have to do this offseason to get this team ready to go back out there and win more football games. We have a lot of stuff to figure out, a lot of little things, whether it's pre-snap stuff, getting our plays right, having a really efficient offense and scoring more touchdowns. I have incredibly high expectations for this team, for this organization, just like I think everybody in the building does."

It sounds like Kittle is saying in the most diplomatic and polite way possible that Shanahan in particular needs to spend the offseason fixing his offensive scheme and addressing its failures in the red zone. Shanahan has to hold up his end of the bargain. He's not a motivator or a delegator, so he needs to be a top-notch playcaller for the 49ers to succeed, and this year he was sub par.

Let's see if Shanahan can bounce back.

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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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