Kyle Shanahan provides injury updates on Christian McCaffrey, Deebo Samuel, Trent Williams
The San Francisco 49ers lost more than just the game against the Cleveland Browns Sunday, as several key veterans came down with injuries. Running back Christian McCaffrey (oblique/ribs), receiver Deebo Samuel (shoulder) and left tackle Trent Williams (ankle) all exited the game against Cleveland, leaving head coach Kyle Shanahan and co. in a tough spot.
Without the star-studded trio, the 49ers dropped their first game of the season, 19-17. Shanahan provided an update on the status of all three Monday, saying that McCaffrey is undergoing an MRI to determine the severity of his injury, Samuel is day-to-day, while Williams avoided a high-ankle sprain, according to Clayton Holloway of NFL Network.
Shanahan later revealed the exact plays in which McCaffrey and Samuel got hurt. Williams suffered his ankle injury in the first quarter.
“Yeah, Deebo was the first play of the game on the jet sweep,” Shanahan said, via 49ers Webzone. “He just took a shot on the shoulder. It didn’t look overly big or anything, it just connected right. And so it got him after that. If you watch him like the next eight plays and stuff, you could just tell his feeling was starting to go because he couldn’t use his left arm. He tried to come back and stuff, but just couldn’t get feeling back in it. So we had to shut him down. Christian we’re not sure about. He mentioned about four possible plays he thought he could’ve done it on, but we’re not sure which one he did.”
Kyle Shanahan sums up loss to Browns
After scoring 30 plus points in the first five games this season, San Francisco’s offense sputtered against the league’s No. 1 defense. Quarterback Brock Purdy, thought to be an MVP candidate, completed 12-of-27 passes for just 125 yards with one touchdown and one interception.
Shanahan credited Cleveland’s defensive approach in making things tough on Purdy.
“I mean, they played aggressive man coverage. We knew that going into it,” Shanahan said. “They had a couple of pressures that got us, we had a couple mistakes that got us in really negative situations. We had two drives in that game that didn’t have a negative play. That was the first drive that we scored a touchdown and it was the last drive where we ended up missing that field goal. We got in some negative situations where we had second-and-long and third-and-long. And then with that pass rush and the tight coverages, that makes it really tough on a quarterback.
“So I think just as a team wholly, just getting into some of those bad situations made Brock’s job a lot tougher. But he mixed it up throughout the game, did a good job. It was tough on film going in and it was tough during the game too.”