The San Francisco 49ers suffered a significant blow to their offense just prior to the start of the regular season with the loss of running back Jerick McKinnon to a season-ending ACL tear late last month.
This has quickly altered things for the 49ers, who were counting on McKinnon to play a major role in their offensive game plan in his first campaign with the franchise. Head coach Kyle Shanahan has acknowledged that even stating that his absence will change things quite a bit for what San Francisco plans to do on that side of the ball this upcoming season. according to Eric Branch of SF Gate.
“Since the day we signed him, we’ve been game planning for Minnesota,” Shanahan said. “So I’m not going to lie — it changes things pretty drastically. That was (our) first target in free agency, so once you do it, you have a plan on how to use him, especially going into Week 1.”
The 49ers had inked McKinnon over the offseason on a four-year, $30 million with the hope that he could step in as their workhorse running back behind quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo. The 26-year-old has shown to be a versatile talent that could heavily impact the game as both a runner and receiver out of the backfield.
Instead, it has pushed the team to make a late offseason acquisition of veteran running back Alfred Morris to step into the fold as the primary option. Morris has much experience playing in Shanahan's offense given that he previously worked in it with the Washington Redskins where he had a tremendous amount of success with all three of his 1,000 rushing yard campaigns. It has also put Matt Breida into the mix to a larger degree to make up for the loss of McKinnon.
This has put the responsibility on Morris and Brieda to provide reliable production in the backfield while Garoppolo has an increased level of dependency on him to push the offense forward. Time will tell if the 49ers will be able to experience success without their key offseason addition in the mix in 2018.
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