Everyone needs to have bedrock principles — beliefs and knowledge that drive them through their everyday lives.
I have a few. One of them is that running backs don’t matter.
Yes, I’m a sick puppy to consider such a stance part of my core identity, but I truly believe that in the modern NFL, running backs are a dime a dozen.
I’ve lost friends and family, but rarely a fantasy football league because of my stance.
And the 49ers are about to test my faith in a serious way.
Three weeks into the season, the 49ers have run out of running backs. Raheem Mostert is out. JaMycal Hasty is out. Trey Sermon is concussed. Elijah Mitchell has a shoulder injury. They’re signing dudes off practice squads to spell dudes they’ve signed off the street.
It’s all rather inexplicable — my best guesses on the reason for the Niners’ constant injury woes all revolve around voodoo at this point. It’s certainly less than ideal.
Have the Niners reached the end of the line? The point where running backs actually do matter?
It’d be incredible if that happened with Kyle Shanahan’s team.
The Shanahan family has long been a refuge for unwanted running backs. Their outside-zone blocking system, which favors one-cut-and-go backs has turned no-names into some of the best running backs in the NFL. While the best running backs have it all — speed, vision, and toughness — the Shanahan system really only needs one such trait to make an elite running back.
Mike Shanahan, Kyle’s father and former Broncos and Washington coach, found Terrell Davis, a sixth-round pick, who ran to two Super Bowl titles and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. There was Olandis Gary, Mike Anderson, Reuben Droughns, Tatum Bell, and Alfred Morris after him.
And who was Raheem Mostert before he became one of the best running backs in the league with Kyle Shanahan? He was a gunner, on his second contract for special teams.
The Shanahans know how to find running backs who fit their system — a system that’s being run all over the league now.
Perhaps it’s that proliferation of the offense that leaves the Niners in dire straits. Market forces have dried up the running back market.
Regardless, Kyle Shanahan is going to have to find himself a few new backs.
Is there a C.J. Anderson out there? A Cal product who was sitting on his couch, admittedly putting on weight, when the Rams called him to be their top running back in a Shanahan-style offense for the end of the 2018 season. He averaged 148 yards per game in his regular-season stint and 123 yards in a Rams’ playoff game, helping Los Angeles win the NFC that season.
Maybe that player is Trenton Cannon — signed off waivers after Week 1.
Maybe it’s Jacques Patrick, a bruising back who was an understudy to Dalvin Cook (a great Shanahan-system back) at Florida State. The Niners signed him off the Bengals practice squad this week.
There could well be others. Deon Jackson and his 4.35 40-yard dash speed (third in the 2021 NFL draft class — Mitchell was second) are on the Colts practice squad. And Jake Funk — pick No. 233 out of Maryland — made the Rams’ 53-man roster but has only seen three offensive snaps so far this season. Perhaps an in-division trade is in order?
But who knows if any of these players — on the roster or hypothetically so — will be effective.
The Niners are reaching so deep into the barrel that they might have reached the point where a Shanahan system — the kind of team that convinced me that running backs don’t matter — is not just past diminishing returns, but is now in the area of negative returns.
Running backs might matter now.
And if that is, indeed, the case, I’m not the only one who should be worried. It should create a full-blown crisis of the faithful.
