All 49ers

The 49ers Have to Play Jordan Mason and Isaac Guerendo More

In two games with Christian McCaffrey, the 49ers have scored just 40 points.

Grant Cohn

Oct 6, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Jordan Mason (24) during the first quarter against the Arizona Cardinals at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
Oct 6, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Jordan Mason (24) during the first quarter against the Arizona Cardinals at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images / Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
In this story:

Christian McCaffrey came back and somehow the 49ers offense became worse.

In two games with McCaffrey, the 49ers have scored just 40 points.

This shouldn't happen. The offense was doing well enough before McCaffrey returned. It scored 36 points against the Seahawks four weeks ago. And the running game was good. Jordan Mason and Isaac Guerendo had emerged as an elite running-back tandem. Mason is one of the hardest runners in the NFL and Guerendo is one of the fastest. They compliment each other. And they're young and fresh.

Adding McCaffrey to Mason and Guerendo only should make the 49ers offense better. But instead of using all three running backs, the 49ers have used mainly McCaffrey, who's clearly not 100 percent himself yet after missing most of the offseason and half of the season with bilateral Achilles' tendonitis.

And so, instead of having an explosive tandem of running backs, the 49ers have one bellcow who's desperately trying to regain his burst. Through two games, McCaffrey is averaging just 3.7 yards per carry -- his lowest average since his rookie season.

And yet he's still playing 91 percent of the 49ers' offensive snaps. Kyle Shanahan clearly feels McCaffrey's presence on the field improves the offense, particularly the passing game, because he's such a tough matchup.

But for the time being, McCaffrey is hurting the running game. The 49ers need to redistribute some of his carries to Mason and Guerendo to balance out the offense. And if Shanahan doesn't want to take McCaffrey off the field, he can play him and Mason at the same time. That would be more dangerous than playing a sixth offensive lineman, which is what the 49ers did at times during their loss to the Seahawks.

Time to show some new wrinkles.

Published
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.

Home/News