Activating George Kittle Ended The 49ers' Four-Game Option On Him
The 49ers activated their tight end from the physically unable to perform list at 10:02 on Sunday morning, seven months after the Achilles and seven days before the roster comes to 53. The move is not a promise that he plays in Melbourne. It is a decision that he will not be made to miss the first four games.
George Kittle is off the physically unable to perform list. San Francisco announced it at 10:02 a.m. Pacific on Sunday, on the club's own account and not to its newsroom index, which is where it still was not four hours later.
The club's roster page carries the same thing in a shorter form. Read on Sunday afternoon, the active physically-unable-to-perform table holds two names, Isaac Guerendo and Mykel Williams. It held four on July 25. Kittle and Alfred Collins are off it.
What the activation does is close a door, and the door is worth more than the practice reps. The league's own training camp rules say a player can be removed from the active PUP list at any point in camp and cannot be put back on it. A player still sitting on that list when rosters come to 53 can be moved to reserve/PUP, and a player moved to reserve/PUP has to miss at least the team's first four games. Kittle is now ineligible for that list for the rest of this season. He was ineligible the moment San Francisco filed the paperwork, before he ran a single route.
So the four games are no longer available to be spent. Those four are the Rams in Melbourne on September 10, then Miami, Arizona and Denver.
None of that is the same as saying he plays in Melbourne. Activation makes a player eligible to practice and nothing else. Matt Maiocco, writing for NBC Sports Bay Area fifteen minutes after the club's announcement, reported that Kittle was likely to take part in individual drills on Sunday and that whether he would be in any of the team's 11-on-11 periods was unknown. Those are two different things and the second one is the one that matters.
The injury is seven months old and the surgery is three days younger than that. Kittle tore his right Achilles tendon against Philadelphia in the first round of the playoffs on January 11 and had it repaired three days later. He is a seven-time Pro Bowl selection and he has not played a competitive snap since the tear.
Asked by NBC Sports Bay Area last week whether he was confident he would not open the season on the list, Kittle said: "Very confident. Sooner than later." On the opener itself he was looser. "I have a chance," he said. "We're running around a lot, hitting top speeds. Hopefully, we're back in pads practicing sooner than later. Just trying to check the boxes and not be a dumbass."
The roster consequence lands on August 30, which is seven days out. A player on reserve/PUP does not count against the 53. Kittle now does. San Francisco has spent a spot it had the option of keeping, and it spent it on a tight end who cannot be ruled in for Week 1 yet, which is the trade the club decided was worth making on a Sunday in August rather than on the Saturday of cut weekend.
It also changes the arithmetic on the two men still on the list. Four players went onto active PUP on July 25. Two of them, Kittle and Collins, are now off it and cannot return to it. Collins started at defensive line in the game book at the Chargers on August 20, so his has been settled for a while. That leaves Guerendo and Williams as the only two men San Francisco can still put on reserve/PUP, and the open Called Shot that at least two of the four would be there on August 30 now needs both of them to land there. It has gone from a four-man proposition to a two-for-two.
The flight is the real deadline and it is earlier than the game. San Francisco is scheduled to fly to Australia on September 2, eight days before kickoff, to get a week of acclimatisation. Kittle has said it makes sense for the club to settle his status before that plane leaves so he can skip the trip if he is not going to play in it. That puts a decision the club would normally make on a Wednesday injury report into the last week of August instead.
Christian McCaffrey returned to practice on Sunday as well, and Maiocco filed on the pair of them together in the hour after the activation. McCaffrey was not on any list. He was just out.
The preseason finale is Thursday at Las Vegas. Between now and the cutdown there are two practices' worth of published reports, one exhibition nobody expects Kittle to be near, and a paperwork deadline the club has already answered one of the harder questions on.
