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Will 49ers RB Christian McCaffrey Play Football This Season?

In retrospect, it seems ridiculous that the 49ers listed McCaffrey as questionable for Week 1 and ruled him out only 90 minutes before kickoff.

Grant Cohn

Dec 31, 2023; Landover, Maryland, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey (23) is tackled by Washington Commanders safety Kamren Curl (31) during the first half at FedExField. Mandatory Credit: Brad Mills-Imagn Images
Dec 31, 2023; Landover, Maryland, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey (23) is tackled by Washington Commanders safety Kamren Curl (31) during the first half at FedExField. Mandatory Credit: Brad Mills-Imagn Images / Brad Mills-Imagn Images
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SANTA CLARA -- Technically, the news of Christian McCaffrey's bilateral Achilles tendonitis broke on Friday. Most people simply didn't know what "bilateral" means in this context.

General manager John Lynch said it Friday during his weekly interview on KNBR and no one asked him a follow-up question. Eventually, people realized that bilateral means McCaffrey has Achilles tendonitis in both legs, which is alarming. So on Monday, head coach Kyle Shanahan finally was asked about this not-so-new development.

Q: There was a report today that RB Christian McCaffrey has Achilles tendonitis in both legs. Is that correct and is that a new development?

SHANAHAN: “No, during the time he’s had it in both. I think it started in one, you overcompensate, it went to the other. But mainly one of them has just been bothering him, but he’s had it in both.”

Oh, now he tells us.

In retrospect, it seems ridiculous that the 49ers listed McCaffrey as questionable for Week 1 and ruled him out only 90 minutes before kickoff. If he had bilateral Achilles tendonitis at that time, then there was no way he could play.

It sounds like all of McCaffrey's efforts to recover from this injury have only made it worse. Perhaps the treatments he received in Germany will help, but for how long? When will he start experiencing soreness again?

Most reporters estimate that McCaffrey should return some time between Week 10 and Week 12. But as each day passes, it looks more and more unlikely that McCaffrey will play at all this season.

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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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