Christian McCaffrey's Impact on the 49ers' Ground Game

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00:00Tom, outside of your outstanding plays of the day, I do want to get your opinion on

00:06something. The guys were talking about it. Kevin mentioned it, but we saw the 49ers have

00:11an aggressive ground game without Christian McCaffrey. We saw versatility out of a number

00:15of guys. We saw guys that could probably come in strong with rush and receiving props down

00:20the line here. So like, how do you think this changes things, maybe even value when it comes

00:24to Christian McCaffrey over the next couple of weeks?

00:28Well, the first thing we'd want to get is an update on his health. Will he be playing?

00:34Will they ease him back in? He may play in week two, but they'll say, oh, he's on a limited

00:39snap count. He's going to see a decreased workload, something along those lines. That

00:44is a key piece of information that we need. And I would say we can operate that game or

00:49hypothetically that game, something along the lines of what we saw tonight, where it's

00:52going to be Mason, it's going to be Devo Samuel. That's what we could work with going forward.

00:57Probably a steady use in the passing game for not necessarily McCaffrey, but the other

01:01players that we saw involved tonight, as you mentioned, you know, time possession, you

01:05know, as I said last night, like one thing that I always want to make sure with recaps

01:08is like, we always get something actionable from this. So teams facing the 49ers, if we

01:14know like that's the Shanahan calling card, they're going to, they're going to like destroy

01:18the clock. They're going to like sap away the time off the clock. And that limits the

01:22opposing team's ability to run plays. So that is like the, the key is opposing quarterbacks

01:28under on passing attempts, because if they literally just don't have the ball for that

01:32amount of time, a quarterback's not going to be flying to 35 or 40 passing attempts.

01:36Even it was Aaron Rogers tonight, a quarterback I expected to start slow, but in general,

01:40if the 49ers are running the ball, the opposing team's not going to be piling up all these

01:44yards. They're just not going to have a chance to run as many plays. So we can look forward

01:48to Mason and Samuel being consistent options if CMC is limited in some capacity, and we

01:53just trust the 49ers defense to do their thing week in and week out.