To watch Christian McCaffrey gallop through defenses, plow over defenders and make grown men whiff in space, you wouldn’t know that the San Francisco 49ers running back was coming off a season-ending injury in 2024.
For players, especially those who rely on speed and agility, coming back from an injury-marred campaign like CMC dealt with -- missing the first eight games with Achilles tendinitis and ending the year with a PCL injury that sideswiped the final five -- it usually takes time to get up to speed. A quarter of a year, half a year, sometimes a full year until we see players who’ve missed that much time bounce back to form.
McCaffrey is built different.
The running back leads the NFL with 185 touches and 981 scrimmage yards in 2025. He is No. 1 in carries with 132 through seven weeks and third in catches with 53 (behind receivers Ja'Marr Chase, 58, and Puka Nacua, 54). His 516 receiving yards put him eighth among all players and are the second-most by an RB in the first seven games of the season in the Super Bowl era, behind only Alvin Kamara’s 556 in 2020.
Normally, we might not blink at McCaffrey churning out yards at this rate. He’s done it before. Coming off an injury changes the perception. If he keeps up this pace, McCaffrey would be the first player in NFL history to lead the league in scrimmage yards the season after missing 12-plus games the previous year, per NFL Research.
The Niners back is the second player in NFL history with 450-plus rush yards and 450-plus receiving yards in the first seven games of a season, matching only Marshall Faulk’s 2000 season. Faulk won the AP NFL Most Valuable Player award that year.
Per Next Gen Stats, McCaffrey leads the NFL with 46 missed tackles forced in 2025, just ahead of Jonathan Taylor's 44.
Perhaps making McCaffrey’s production more impressive is that he’s carrying a 5-2 injury-riddled 49ers club that has been without its starting quarterback and multiple receivers, and lost its top two defensive players for the season.
Luckily for San Francisco, the engine remains humming.
McCaffrey has accounted for 48.9 percent of the Niners' offensive touches, tops in the NFL. When CMC is on the field, San Francisco has averaged 5.6 yards per play. When he is on the sideline, that figure plummets to 4.0. For context, the Tennessee Titans rank last in the NFL with 4.1 yards per play on the season.
The question in San Francisco is whether McCaffrey can continue carrying such a heavy load for the final 10 games of the season after becoming the first player with 130-plus carries and 50-plus receiving yards through seven tilts.
The Niners will deal with that problem as the fall turns to winter. For now, they’ll continue to saddle up their workhorse, whom they’ve ridden to the top of the NFC West despite all the injuries.