Kurtenbach: Christian McCaffrey’s calf injury could define the 49ers’ season

Will he or won’t he?

It’s not a soap opera question. No, it’s the one that the 49ers will have to answer with star running back Christian McCaffrey every week for the foreseeable future.

It’s a question that could well define the 49ers’ 2024 season.

The Niners had outstanding injury luck last season. They’re starting this one with a harsh dose of reality.

A calf injury and Achilles tendinitis have kept McCaffrey sidelined for the last month-plus. He missed the Niners’ season opener on Monday, and he’ll miss Sunday’s game in Minneapolis, too.

The undefined nature of this injury — this new weekly routine of ambiguity — isn’t going away any time soon because McCaffrey’s calf injury isn’t something that can be rested away.

Obviously, I’m not a doctor or a physical therapist, so I am not in a position to diagnose any injury or speak on its severity. But with McCaffrey sidelined for the past month-plus with a soft-tissue injury, the conversation I had with Niners defensive tackle Javon Hargrave before last year’s Super Bowl has been popping up in my mind again and again.

Hargrave’s hamstring gave out on him in Week 14 last season. Before that point, he had been one of the Niners’ most important defensive players. And while the big man missed only one game, but he was not himself over the Niners’ last five games, registering only one quarterback hit after Thanksgiving.

And it made sense, right? Hargrave’s game is predicted on explosion off the line of scrimmage — he tries to jump off the snap and split gaps on the offensive line to put himself in the backfield. His hamstrings are his game, and as he told me in Nevada in February, he simply didn’t trust them.

Why? Because when you’re dealing with a lower-body muscle strain during a season, there’s simply no way of truly testing it before a game. You’re not going full-speed in practices, and even if you thought you were, the speed of an NFL practice (during training camp or the regular season) doesn’t compare to an actual game.

Call it a fight-or-flight response, but no one can know if that hamstring or calf is back in game shape until you’re playing across from a team looking to inflict pain in front of 70,000 screaming fans.

Hargrave had two weeks off before the Super Bowl, and he was honest about what that meant. A bit more rest than usual was good, but it wasn’t enough to convince him the back of his legs — his moneymakers — would be firing at full speed for the game.

It turned out that the rest did, in fact, help.

But the good times lasted for a half. Hargrave looked hobbled in the second half and overtime against Kansas City. His hamstrings didn’t make it to the finish line.

Sadly, this all feels prescient regarding the McCaffrey calf injury.

The back, who finished third in NFL MVP voting last year, is pushing positivity in public. The injury report and his status for the Niners’ first two games, though, tell the real story.

The line in Santa Clara has been, “If the playoffs were today,” McCaffrey could and would play.

And that has me thinking back to another calf injury saga — Kevin Durant in the 2019 NBA Finals.

We all remember what happened then.

Hargrave was lucky — his hamstring injury never turned catastrophic. A full offseason of rest and stretching had him looking like his old, dominant self again in Week 1.

But Durant missed the full 2019-2020 season in Brooklyn with his ruptured Achilles tendon and played in less than half of the Nets’ games before being traded to Phoenix in 2023.

He had a long way to fall — he’s still one of the league’s best — but he’s never been the same player after the Achilles tear.

If we learned anything from the Durant saga, it’s that when you’re dealing with a calf injury, you’re dealing with an Achilles, too. It’s not surprising the Niners are listing the tendon on the injury report these days.

And if the injury worsens, perhaps it’s just the muscle that goes. Or perhaps it’s much, much worse.

The Niners and McCaffrey are playing a perilous game. The player and team obviously want No. 23 on the field, but they’ll never really know if he’s ready to play. They can only rest him and hope that mitigates the risk of the worst-case scenario.

How long will that rest be?

That’s anyone’s guess right now. Both general manager John Lynch and head coach Kyle Shanahan said they aren’t ruling out putting McCaffrey on injured reserve — keeping him sidelined for at least four weeks — on Friday. An injury that has already lingered for five weeks might need another month-plus.

And even after that, no one will truly know if McCaffrey is good to go until the dice are rolled and he’s in the 49ers’ backfield, facing the Seahawks or Chiefs’ defense.

Yes, there’s a world where this nagging injury — this sense of foreboding — goes away.

As of today, more than a month after Shanahan first reported this injury, I don’t think that’s the world we live in.

Rather, this seems like something that will be a constant nag on the 49ers’ season.

This was the downside the 49ers faced when they traded for the at-the-time injury-riddled running back in 2022. So far, it’s been almost all upside — elite-level play — from the running back. The coin has flipped.

The Niners are lucky that they’re in a position to manage such a thing. Teams with lesser rosters would stop printing playoff tickets today. (Yes, I know all the tickets are digital, now.)

But McCaffrey’s injury won’t be the last. This is full-speed football, after all.

And while the Niners probably only need McCaffrey for four, maybe five regular-season games this campaign — all coming from Week 6 onwards — things can change fast in the NFL.

Even if McCaffrey’s injury status, it seems, does not.