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Unusual: Christian McCaffrey Avoids the Media this Week

I have a working hypothesis about why he may have ducked us.

Grant Cohn

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SANTA CLARA -- Is something up with Christian McCaffrey?

He's extremely professional, takes his media obligations seriously and always talks to beat writers in the 49ers locker room on Thursdays. Not this week, though.

This Thursday, a P.R. staffer said McCaffrey would rather talk on Friday. Fine. No big deal. But then on Friday, the same P.R. staffer said he lost McCaffrey, simply couldn't find him. CMC went into the trainer's room and disappeared, which may be true.

So McCaffrey didn't talk to the media this week -- a first for him as a member of the 49ers. I have a working hypothesis about why he may have ducked us.

McCaffrey wants to be the MVP -- that's obvious. And he probably wanted to have a big game on National television against the Ravens. I'm sure he expected to have a big game.

But it turned out that Christmas night was not his coronation -- it was Brock Purdy's. Or it was supposed to be Purdy's, but he fumbled the crown. The game plan was decidedly skewed toward passing, and McCaffrey finished the game with just 14 carries.

I'm guessing McCaffrey would have liked more than 14 carries. I'm guessing he thinks the 49ers would have won if they had given him his typical workload, because they almost certainly wouldn't have had all those interceptions. And he played well against the Ravens, averaged 7.4 yards per carry. He was ready for the moment. Purdy was not.

I'm guessing McCaffrey didn't want to answer questions about that game, because he's extremely honest with the media, and he might have said something the team didn't like.

That's just a working hypothesis, but it seems plausible.

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.

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