Christian McCaffrey still sits at the center of everything the 49ers want to do at running back, but the numbers from 2025 raise a real question heading into 2026: how much more can San Francisco ask from him on the ground?
McCaffrey was the 49ers’ Offensive Player of the Year and the likely MVP for the team in 2025, yet his value came more from being an all-purpose weapon than from elite efficiency as a runner. He did clear 1,200 rushing yards, finishing with 1,202, but that total came on volume more than explosion. For the first time in his career, he topped 300 rushing attempts, and the workload did not produce the kind of return the 49ers have seen from him in past seasons.
It was only the third time McCaffrey finished a season under four yards per carry. The first came in 2020, when injuries limited him to three games and a 3.8 average. The other was his rookie season in 2017, when he averaged 3.7 yards per carry on 117 attempts.
The workload also put McCaffrey in a rare statistical bucket. He became the 41st running back since 2010 to reach 300 rushing attempts in a season, and among that group, his 1,202 rushing yards ranked 39th. Only 2021 Najee Harris, with 1,200 yards on 307 carries, and 2010 Cedric Benson, with 1,111 yards on 321 carries, finished lower.
That’s the tension for San Francisco. McCaffrey remains the offense’s most important piece, but the 49ers would almost certainly like better production from that kind of workload.
The other big piece of the puzzle is whether his role as a pass catcher shrinks enough to ease some of that burden. Injuries and Brandon Aiyuk falling off the face of the earth pushed McCaffrey into an even bigger role in 2025, and he ended up leading the 49ers in rushing, receptions, and receiving yards. He finished with a career-high 413 touches, only the second time he has crossed 400 in a season, and no player in the league had more.
Jonathan Taylor was next with 369 touches, followed by Bijan Robinson at 366, though Robinson still finished with 172 more total yards than McCaffrey despite 47 fewer touches.
With the additions of Mike Evans, De’Zhaun Stribling, and now Deebo Samuel, plus the hope that George Kittle stays healthy, McCaffrey’s receiving load figures to move back closer to the 65-70 catches per season he averaged before 2025. In theory, that should help preserve him and maybe unlock more efficiency as a runner. But he’s also now 30, and if the rushing production looks like it did last season, regression is the word that will hang over the position.
Behind him, the 49ers have kept drafting runners, but that has not translated into meaningful usage. They used the 90th overall pick in April on Indiana’s Kaelon Black, making it the third straight year they have spent a draft choice on a running back. Still, Isaac Guerendo and Jordan James combined for just 84 rush attempts during their time with San Francisco.
Even with that, the 49ers were so confident in Guerendo and James before training camp last year that they traded a sixth-round pick to Washington for Brian Robinson, who ended up second on the team in rushing attempts with 92.
And that may be the simplest answer in all of this: the non-McCaffrey backs probably won’t matter much unless McCaffrey needs a breather. Since McCaffrey arrived in San Francisco in 2022, nobody else at the position has come close to his share of the workload.
In McCaffrey’s two fully healthy seasons with the 49ers, he has handled 74.5 percent of the carries by the team’s running backs, not counting Deebo Samuel or quarterback scrambles. In 2023, McCaffrey had 272 carries. In 2025, he had 311, while Brian Robinson added 92.
That kind of split is hard to imagine changing in 2026, even with Black, Guerendo, and James in the mix. Samuel’s arrival could complicate things a bit, but the most likely outcome is still the same: McCaffrey gets the overwhelming majority of the work, somewhere around that 75 percent carry share the 49ers have already leaned on.
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