All 49ers

Can the 49ers Count on Christian McCaffrey to Stay Healthy this Year?

No one burned the 49ers more than Christian McCaffrey did last season.
Grant Cohn|
Jun 11, 2025; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey speaks to the media following a team OTA at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images
Jun 11, 2025; Santa Clara, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey speaks to the media following a team OTA at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images | D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images

In this story:

San Francisco 49ers

No one burned the 49ers more than Christian McCaffrey did last season.

After carrying the team and winning the Offensive Player of the Year Award for 2023, he played in only four games in 2024. And when he played, he wasn't particularly good. That was before he tore his PCL.

Now, he's 29, which is old for a running back. Still, he's had a long offseason to recover and he says he's 100 percent healthy. That's why ESPN expects McCaffrey to have a bounce-back season this year.

"Fantasy's dominant non-QB for the 2022 and 2023 seasons burned both the 49ers and fantasy investors last season, as a preseason calf injury delayed his debut -- not for mere weeks, but until Week 10 in November," writes ESPN senior fantasy football writer Eric Karabell. "McCaffrey ended up participating in only four games and at an ordinary level, scoring nary a touchdown. McCaffrey will not be the No. 1 pick in 2025 drafts, but many will fade him in early rounds due to the extreme risk of potential missed games. McCaffrey has played in double-digit games in just two of the past five seasons."

That's a sobering statistic. It seems 2022 and 2023 may have been outlier years for McCaffrey, a smaller running back who has touched the ball thousands of times since college.

If the 49ers are smart, they'll use McCaffrey much less this year than they did in the past. Fortunately for them, second-year running back Isaac Guerendo is an extremely dangerous receiver as well and can do a lot of the things McCaffrey does for the offense.

Read more

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.

Share on XFollow grantcohn
Home/News