Like all the members of the 49ers Faithful on Friday morning, Kyle Shanahan is excited.
The San Francisco head coach said as much in an exclusive interview with Murph & Mac on Friday morning, when he broke down his perspective of the Christian McCaffrey sweepstakes after the 49ers landed one of the premier running backs in a blockbuster trade on Thursday evening.
“I think in the last couple days — we always knew it made sense for us, but you gotta see how you’re going to get there, who you’re competing with and things like that — in the last couple days we saw that we had a chance to compete for him and he turned up here,” Shanahan told Murph & Mac on KNBR Friday morning.
“John’s been working the phones for 48 hours, and keeps telling me we’ve got a chance and it’s getting close. I’m sitting down here last night just finishing red zone and stuff. Right towards the end I find out that we got it done. I’m pretty excited to tell you the truth.”
The move gives Shanahan arguably the ideal running back for his offense, one that is predicated on putting talented players in space both in the running and passing games.
The question is for how long? McCaffrey is under contract until 2025, but he’s owed a steep $12 million every season after this one, and they are not guaranteed. Shanahan ensured that the 49ers are set on working that out, not a surprise considering they offloaded four draft picks to acquire him.
“This is not a rental,” Shanahan said. “I mean, that’s the stuff that is tough to where we did that with Emmanuel [Sanders] in the year [2019] we were trying to make the run. We didn’t want it to be a rental. I mean, he was someone we were really hoping to re-sign the next year. But you realize, just going through that, I realized how difficult that is.
“So that was something that you think about in this time. And that was something that, at least for me and definitely John [Lynch], that was so much more enticing, knowing if we got him, just contractually and stuff, he’s going to be here. We don’t have to be risking this come February.”
Shanahan said that it’s possible McCaffrey plays on Sunday vs. the Chiefs, but that it would probably be in a limited role as he won’t be able to get a sense of the playbook. He should be good to go on Sunday vs. the Rams two weeks from now.
Overall, Shanahan sees McCaffrey as a top tier NFL talent, and even compared him to the great Nick Bosa.
“I put him on that Bosa-type level,” Shanahan said. “The way he was raised, the way he’s looked at everything, it’s just 100% commitment to being the best he can be at what he does and he’s been doing that since he was probably 3 years old.”
Listen to the full interview below. You can listen to every KNBR interview on our podcast page at knbr.com/podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Catch Murph & Mac weekdays from 6 – 10 a.m. on KNBR 104.5 / 680 and streaming live on KNBR.com.
