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REPORT: 49ers RB Christian McCaffrey to Miss at Least the Next 6 Games

It's fair to wonder if McCaffrey will be able to contribute at all this season.

Grant Cohn

Feb 8, 2024; Las Vegas, NV, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey (23) during a press conference before Super Bowl LVIII at Hilton Lake Las Vegas Resort and Spa. Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-Imagn Images
Feb 8, 2024; Las Vegas, NV, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey (23) during a press conference before Super Bowl LVIII at Hilton Lake Las Vegas Resort and Spa. Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-Imagn Images / Kyle Terada-Imagn Images
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The news about Christian McCaffrey keeps getting worse.

First, Kyle Shanahan said the 49ers were not even considering putting McCaffrey on Injured Reserve. This was Wednesday. Then something happened in practice on Thursday. Now, McCaffrey is on I.R. for at least the next four games. And according to the NFL Network's Ian Rapoport, McCaffrey will miss at least the next six games.

"Christian McCaffrey, the star running back for the 49ers, was officially placed on Injured Reserve yesterday," Rapoport said. "He is out the next four games at least. That means Jordan Mason, the former undrafted free agent who became a star last week, is now the starter going forward. My understanding is that McCaffrey is dealing with painful Achilles tendonitis. It was described to me as frustratingly difficult. Difficult to run. Certainly difficult to get rid of. He is not at more of a risk of tearing his Achilles, but from my understanding, he's likely to be out six weeks or potentially more, which means Mason, the preseason MVP of the 49ers, is going to get a ton of touches."

Sounds like the 49ers hope to have McCaffrey back for their Week 7 Super Bowl rematch against the Chiefs. But it also sounds like the 49ers have absolutely no idea when McCaffrey's Achilles will be 100 percent healthy and they're throwing out random timetables to pacify anxious fans and fantasy football players.

It's fair to wonder if McCaffrey will be able to contribute at all this season. It will be interesting to see how the 49ers perform without 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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