The late injury update from the San Francisco 49ers regarding Christian McCaffrey will have worried a lot of people, but it's unlikely Kyle Shanahan will have expressed much concern about it before their Monday Night Football game with the New York Jets.
McCaffrey was a surprise inactive for the blockbuster primetime clash, the reigning Offensive Player of the Year having previously insisted he would play despite being limited in practice all week with a calf/Achilles.
But he and the 49ers decided to take the cautious route after they and McCaffrey were dissatisfied with the results of him testing the calf out on Monday morning.
That robbed the 49ers of their offensive focal point, a gamebreaking chess piece in both the run game and the passing attack, but it served to give Shanahan the opportunity to do one of the things he does best, get the most out of a lowly drafted running back.
Rather than worrying about the loss of McCaffrey, Shanahan will have relished the task of turning Jordan Mason into the star of the show, particularly after an excellent training camp for the third-year former undrafted free agent.
After all, Shanahan and his father Mike have a long history of transforming low draft picks and undrafted players into production machines. From Terrell Davis and Mike Anderson, through to Alfred Morris and Raheem Mostert among many others, it is a staple trick in the Shanahan bag.
Mason, who had previously flashed promise in 2022 before struggling to get on the field last year as McCaffrey became the undoubted bellcow, is an ideal fit for the Shanahan scheme. He is a decisive, one-cut back who gets downhill in a hurry and can punish defenders with his imposing frame.
And, in McCaffrey's absence, he proved the perfect player to help the 49ers play old school bullyball in a dominant 32-19 victory over the Jets.
Mason carried the ball 28 times, more than he had at any point during his collegiate career at Georgia Tech and the most of any 49ers player during Shanahan's tenure as head coach. Rarely did he show signs of wearing down as he piled up 147 yards and a touchdown. He had four rushes of 10 yards or more and two more explosive runs, including a 17-yard touchdown called back by penalty.
The result was a domineering performance by the 49er offense, which early in the game looked as if it might struggle in the face of a vaunted Jets defensive line and an even more vaunted secondary.
San Francisco's O-Line was shaky in the early going, but it unsurprisingly warmed to the task of consistently blocking for a bowling ball of a back, for whom they opened up holes at will as the Jets' search for answers proved futile.
With the ground game dictating terms, Brock Purdy was afforded time to pick apart the Jets' defensive backfield, a New York front that had initially threatened to throttle him struggling to lay a glove on the 49ers' quarterback. Rookie right guard Dominick Puni was a hugely impressive standout.
After their opening three and out, the 49ers scored on eight successive possessions, with miscues such as a Brandon Aiyuk drop on a perfect pass to the corner of the endzone from Purdy going unpunished.
The only quibble Shanahan will have is that only two of those scores were touchdowns. Their failure to punch it in more often can partly be attributed to rust, but Shanahan will know that they cannot continue to be so profligate going forward during what the 49ers hope will be another season that ends in the Super Bowl.
But Shanahan's emphatic success in taking it back to the old school and winning not with McCaffrey, but by leaning on a back who was largely an afterthought last season, and with the likes of Aiyuk and Trent Williams not in peak shape, was a brutal demonstration of why this Niners team is again a red-hot favorite to be playing in the final game of the season.
Related: The most important defensive players for the 49ers in the 2024 season, not including their captains
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