The 49ers spent much of 2025 looking like a team with a running game that had lost its edge. Then Week 1 arrived, and against the Rams, the whole operation finally looked connected again.
What changed wasn’t one magic fix. It was the entire offense working together.
The backs hit holes with force, the line held up, and the receivers did their part on the perimeter. That kind of synchronized effort was missing for too much of last season.
Offensive coordinator Klay Kubiak framed it the right way after the strong showing.
“I look at it as a unit thing. It's offensive unit success,” said offensive coordinator Klay Kubiak.
“I just thought our backs ran really well. I thought our O-Line played very well.
I thought our receivers blocked very well. So collectively in the run game, I thought everyone was pretty tied together and played really well.
We had games like that last year, but it was inconsistent.”
That inconsistency was the defining issue in 2025. The 49ers had stretches where the ground game popped, including against the Falcons and the Giants, but those outings still didn’t match the clean, efficient rhythm they showed against Los Angeles. Last season, the pieces rarely clicked at the same time.
Some of the blame has landed on Christian McCaffrey, and there may be something to that. He’s not quite the same explosive player he was a few seasons ago.
But the source of the problem went deeper than one back. The blocking was uneven across the board, with the offensive line, tight ends and receivers all failing to stack enough clean snaps together.
That’s why Week 1 stood out. George Kittle was on the field, something that wasn’t true for a large chunk of 2025.
Deebo Samuel is back, too. And rookie Kaelon Black has been part of the mix.
Kubiak pointed to the backs as a big reason the day went the way it did.
“I thought there was a good rotation with the backs where I thought either back who touched the ball, to me, they were explosive. They were powerful,” said Kubiak.
“I think all those things kind of built up to a good day running the ball. It's just one game.
We have to keep getting better and keep pushing our guys so we can try to be that way every week.”
One game doesn’t settle anything. Week 1 could turn out to be an outlier, and the 49ers could drift back into the same issues that haunted them last season. But with Black in the rotation and the offense finally blocking as a true unit, they at least looked like a team with a working formula again.
Week 2 against the Miami Dolphins should tell us a lot more about whether this running game has actually been revived.
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