49ers' Super Bowl Hopes Hinge on Christian McCaffrey's Health

I am real worried that CMC is going to need more than a bye week here, Greg, and now I'm starting to get to that point where I love the system and Purdy's been great, but my goodness, I mean, there is, you lose him for any extended period of time, that opens the door for Seattle, opens the door for the Rams. I hope everything is okay with him, but again, I can't wait to see what happens to the 49ers out of the bye week i do think they're the best of the rest so far but the injuries are the thing that can derail them and i'm a little bit worried he goes down what do the 49ers have left at that point yeah no they have Keon Black and he's a he's a rookie or second year player they don't have much but it's this but look the 49ers had a Mason play a couple of years ago for them and he was fantastic and got himself a deal with the Vikings too uh you got to remember it's the Shanahan run game so it doesn't take anything away from Christian McCaffrey but you it's the same Shanahan run game that his dad ran uh Joe when it was Terrell Davis and uh Mike Anderson and Olandis Gary and Portis and it was just every every running back on Denver was a superstar and so i i sort of feel the same way about San Francisco they've had some guys come through there who have actually been uh pretty viable uh to your point uh look i i i do think the 49ers right now we should call them the best team in the league i think what you saw from Seattle monday night tells us let's not forget how good seattle was last year and what they did to Kansas City on Monday night was super duper impressive like that's going to be a really good team too i like as i mentioned i like the bears but uh the what did the 49ers do so far joe they did something that's really important where you can't win the super bowl in september and august but they just banked themselves five wins so if they get themselves six or seven wins or five wins the rest of the way what does that mean they're going to have home field they're going to have a bye and they're going to be in a great spot and they're going to be the favorite to get to the Super Bowl but as we've seen before Seattle's had their number and could Seattle beat San Francisco in San Francisco in an NFC championship game situation absolutely could the Bears do it I think so I think it's wide open in the NFC I think there's a lot of teams that are still in play there and you mentioned the injury situation that was their situation last year but it derailed their season last year it just tore them apart and and they had a very off season a lot of people said that Shanahan did his best coaching job last year when they actually performed above with all the injuries they had but Joe when you're so heavily invested in McCaffrey who's no longer young like he used to be Mike Evans who's no longer young like he used to be and you really don't have a ton of wide receiver a lot of the guys that they had born Juwan James are gone now So maybe this is a team, Joe, we talk about trades. Maybe this is actually a team that could do a little more at the trade deadline. Maybe they could tap back into Indianapolis, get Alec Pierce or get somebody else maybe from their roster. I don't know. But you just can't ignore when you start five and know what that means to a football team. Just like Minnesota, too. Even if Minnesota loses a bunch of games, they're still going to have those wins. They're probably going to get a first round bye. And that's just huge for the NFL with all the injuries. they have to get that week off i mean it's it timing is everything right and having uh having that time to maybe heal up here a little bit i got i would love to see Bosa back i think the Forest Buckner gives them go after the quarterback that defense has to be ready to go especially if CMC and knock on wood he has been healthy you know he was healthy a lot longer last year and i thought he was going to be hopefully yeah it won't be out for a while right i mean it was So let's just hope that, I don't know why they didn't address necessarily what, but hopefully Evans comes back healthy. I think they have the pieces, if healthy. That's the big thing.