Christian McCaffrey’s injury status this season has been nebulous.
The 2023 NFL Offensive Player of the Year had a clean MRI when the 49ers took a closer look at the their running back’s injury, but McCaffrey still felt the need to see a specialist in Germany about the nagging Achilles tendonitis. San Francisco head coach Kyle Shanahan provided an update on his superstar’s status on his weekly local radio appearance on KNBR on Thursday.
“I think we’ll get a better idea here over the next couple of weeks,” Shanahan said on KNBR, via 49ers Webzone. “The whole point of putting him on IR is to guarantee that we couldn’t do anything for at least four weeks. And two weeks into it, the whole point was just to rest him for two weeks and not do that.”
Now with a minimum of two weeks left on his injured reserve tenure, the 49ers will have McCaffrey hit the ground running with his rehabilitation work.
“And now, we’re going to start hitting the rehab harder and trying to get him back into football stuff and see how it responds,” Shanahan said. “So we’ll see how he responds here. We’ve let him rest here for a couple of weeks.”
Many people have reacted with alarm upon hearing McCaffrey traveled to Germany for a specialist with the thought process that his injury is worse than the 49ers are letting on. Shanahan doesn’t see it that way.
“Christian’s just seeing every specialist he can, doing all the little stuff that Christian does more than anybody I’ve ever been around,” Shanahan said. “He is of full-time commitment to everything for his body year-round. And so, he’s been doing that stuff while not pushing it hard in rehab. And now, we’ll probably turn it up here in the next couple of weeks. I know he still has at least two more weeks before we could have an option to play him, and we’ll start testing that out sooner than later.”