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49ers Place George Kittle on Injured Reserve

Here we go again.
Grant Cohn|
49ers Place George Kittle on Injured Reserve
49ers Place George Kittle on Injured Reserve

PHOENIX — Here we go again.

For the second season in a row, George Kittle will miss significant time with an injury. This time, he has a calf injury. And so Saturday, the 49ers placed him on Injured Reserve. He can return to the active roster in as soon as three weeks if his calf has healed by then.

Kittle initially injured his calf Week 1 against the Detroit Lions, and has played through the pain every game this season. But he made the injury worse Week 3 against the Green Bay Packers, and now the 49ers have to pay the price.

Last season, Kittle injured his knee during the season opener. Then he broke his foot a few weeks later. In total, he missed eight games last season. This season, he will have to miss at least three.

Which means Kittle has been injured pretty much since the 49ers made him the highest-paid tight end in NFL history last offseason. The 49ers are not getting a good return on their investment.

in retrospect, maybe the 49ers should have seen this coming with Kittle. He’s a tough guy who plays an extremely violent style of football, a style that naturally will lead to injuries. He played through them the first three seasons of his career, but now he’s getting older.

Kittle used to be one of the biggest bargains in the NFL  Now his contract is becoming an albatross for the 49ers, because he’s almost never healthy anymore. In retrospect, maybe the 49ers should have traded him before the injuries started to pile up.

What a shame.

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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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