Mike Evans ‘tightness’ and the 49ers’ injury woes that won’t go away

Uh oh.

There’s that dreaded word again.

Tightness.

The mysterious and seemingly contagious condition that has also kept Christian McCaffrey out of San Francisco 49ers training camp cropped up again Tuesday involving another star player.

Mike Evans.

The veteran receiver who already missed a chunk of practices couldn’t make it to the end of Tuesday’s joint session at the Los Angeles Chargers’ facility in El Segundo.

Although Evans began the practice catching warm-up passes from Brock Purdy, he left midway through and watched the remainder from the sideline with an ice pack on his left quad.

The same quad that forced the 32-year-old free-agent signee to miss two weeks after straining it earlier in camp, an absence he returned from only two practices prior. 

The issue?

“Some tightness,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said. 

Sound familiar?

Shanahan has used the same vague terminology to describe the ailment that has so far kept McCaffrey sidelined. In Evans’ case, at least we know which body part isn’t feeling right.

Not that it’s any reassurance for a receiver going into his 13th season to have an injury reappear after he felt like he had put it behind him enough to return to practice.

And Evans was moving well, like the 6-foot-5 specimen has over the course of a remarkably productive — and durable — career. Evans played all but six of a possible 163 games over his first 10 seasons in the NFL. But the past two years? He’s missed 12 out of 34.

The aging curve is undefeated. You don’t have to tell the 49ers. The rash of injuries probably has less to do with the wrath of the substation adjacent to their practice field than the number of key contributors on their roster who are on the wrong side of 30.

Count among them: tight end George Kittle, 32, recovering from a torn Achilles, and fullback Kyle Juszczyk, 35, out with a fractured finger.

At the tail end of an illustrious career, Evans wasn’t brought in to be a true No. 1 target for Purdy. But his role has taken on more importance with the uncertainty of Kittle’s availability, the season-ending blow to Ricky Pearsall and the persistent calf issues that have kept Christian Kirk out of camp.

“We were just being smart taking him out,” Shanahan said. “I don’t think it’s anything worse.”

They’d better hope so.

Shanahan at least had positive news to relay regarding McCaffrey — and Nick Bosa — though he likely only added fodder for the conspiracy seekers when he was asked about the exact nature of McCaffrey’s “tightness.”

Was it related to the calf and Achilles issues that forced him to sit out training camp and eventually miss all but four games in 2024? That was downplayed at the time, too.

“Just some tightness,” he said. “They get sensitive if I say where.”

The smoke and mirrors only served to fuel speculation that something more was at play. Some around the league, according to NBC Sports’ Mike Florio, began to wonder if McCaffrey was ailing at all and actually quietly holding in for more money after other backs got bigger paydays.

Shanahan emphatically put that rumor to bed.

“I think people make a lot of assumptions,” he said. “That would be one that they’re wrong on.”

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. Maybe there’s nothing to worry about with McCaffrey’s health right now. But there’s plenty of reasons to be precautious, especially when none of the $30 million owed to McCaffrey the next two years is guaranteed.

Shanahan said last week that he was unconcerned about McCaffrey’s absence from camp and Tuesday offered a morsel of information that would suggest the do-it-all running back is on track to suit up in the backfield three weeks from now in Melbourne, Australia.

If that game was this week, McCaffrey would have participated in Tuesday’s practice, he said.

Bosa, who tore his right ACL for the second time last September, was mysteriously absent from practice last week but has ramped up his individual activity since returning. He had been dealing with “soreness” in his surgically repaired right knee that evolved into tendinitis.

“He’s making a lot of progress. A lot less irritation, soreness, tendinitis – whatever you want to call it – than he had last week,” Shanahan said. “So he’s going in the right direction. We see him similar to Christian.”

That all sounds well and good, but until we see the 49ers’ most important players actually put on pads and play a game, it would appear that they are in for another season where the injury report demands as much attention as the box score.