By Vic Tafur, Matt Barrows and Joseph Person
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Monday night, before the game kicks off, San Francisco 49ers fans should give the Carolina Panthers a standing ovation.
Because three years ago, the Panthers made the classy move in trading running back Christian McCaffrey to a good team. A very good team. The 49ers are 30-12 in games that McCaffrey, 29, has played in, and two years after winning Offensive Player of the Year honors, he now leads the NFL in yards from scrimmage.
That’s OK, longtime Panthers long snapper J.J. Jansen said — even though the trade magnified McCaffrey’s worth.
“Good front offices and just good human beings are gonna look for good spots (when trading established players). The problem is when you do that, those players typically excel and then you look more silly,” Jansen said. “But would the better option have been to try to find the worst place for him to go so we look good, or send him to a spot where he can excel because he means a lot to our organization and we want to do right by him?
“I think that second option’s the right option.”
The 49ers didn’t even have to give up a first-round pick — packaging second-, third- and fourth-round picks in 2023, and a fifth-rounder in 2024.
McCaffrey scored 50 touchdowns in 64 games with the Panthers from 2017 to 2022. (Harry How / Getty Images)
Why the Panthers made the trade
Through the first six games in 2022, the Panthers were — to use the technical phrase — a hot mess. Matt Rhule was fired following a 22-point loss to San Francisco in Week 5, when 49ers fans staged a takeover of Bank of America Stadium that helped lead to Rhule’s unemployment. The Panthers fell to 1-5 after a loss to the Los Angeles Rams the following week, when interim coach Steve Wilks sent Robbie Anderson to the locker room after a verbal altercation with receivers coach Joe Dailey. Complicating matters: The Panthers had depleted much of their draft capital in trading for quarterbacks Sam Darnold and Baker Mayfield, who wouldn’t find success until they left Charlotte.
Then-GM Scott Fitterer unloaded Anderson on Arizona the day after his sideline spat, somehow getting two late-round picks from the Cardinals for the mercurial receiver. The sell-off was on. The Panthers’ two biggest trade chips were McCaffrey and edge rusher Brian Burns. Turning down the Rams’ offer of two firsts and a second for Burns, Fitterer instead dealt McCaffrey for the four picks, reasoning it would be easier to replace a running back — even a generational one like McCaffrey — than a pass rusher.
Many of those old Panthers teammates reminisced about the impact McCaffrey made on the organization in his five-plus seasons. But his time was up, and he had a suitor waiting in the wings.
A long-time admirer
Kyle Shanahan has been a McCaffrey admirer most of his life. He went to high school in the Denver area where his father, Mike, was the head coach of the Broncos and where receiver Ed McCaffrey, fresh off a Super Bowl win with the 49ers, quickly became a fan favorite. Ed wasn’t a burner. In fact, his teammates at that time tell stories about him wearing the smallest shoulder pads possible and trimming the thick band of his jock strap into a spaghetti-thin line – anything to be a fraction faster on the football field. It worked. Ed surpassed 1,000 receiving yards in three consecutive seasons, including in 2000 when he caught 101 passes for 1,317 yards and nine touchdowns.
Shanahan, a high school receiver when Ed arrived in Denver, watched the lanky Broncos wideout from the sideline and thought he could one day be like Ed. It’s why he wore No. 87 at Duke and then the University of Texas.
“I did … because I didn’t know enough about football,” Shanahan said. “I idolized Ed and (former Broncos WR) Rod (Smith), but that ship sailed I think when I was an insecure, very skinny junior and I was talking to Ed and thinking he’d make me feel better. I was like, ‘Man, how much did you weigh in high school? You were pretty skinny too. When did you get all big?’ And he was like, ‘I was a tight end in high school. I had to lose weight when I went to college.’ And that’s when I realized — even though I should have on my own — that we’re not at all the same guy.”
The families were close and there was even a story about teenage Kyle babysitting the McCaffrey boys when they were young. But that’s not accurate. The babysitter was Kyle’s older — and more responsible — sibling, Krystal.
“Because we wanted our kids to live,” the boys’ mother, Lisa McCaffrey, once quipped.
When Shanahan became the 49ers’ head coach, he signed the McCaffreys’ oldest son, Max, to the offseason roster. And when Christian became available in a trade in 2022, Shanahan jumped at the chance to add him.
McCaffrey thought he was going to the Rams
McCaffrey, who played at Stanford, started hearing buzz from his agent Joel Segal a day or two before the trade that he might be headed back to the West Coast. “I thought I was going to the Rams just because that’s what I had heard,” McCaffrey said during a video conference with Charlotte media this week. “Then my agent had called me and told me I was going to the Niners.”
McCaffrey this week called it a “massive blessing” to wind up with the 49ers, who made the NFC Championship Game in his first season.
Shanahan felt the same way. In that 2022 meeting, McCaffrey became the only running back opponent to reach the 100-yard mark against the 49ers’ fearsome run defense that season. And by that point, Shanahan also had already churned through a number of tailbacks in his quest to find a tailback centerpiece.
In 2018, he’d brought in Jerick McKinnon to be the runner/pass catcher he envisioned for the role.
“Jerick, when he’s on the field, he’s not on the field just to catch passes,” Shanahan said in 2018. “He’s not on the field just to run the ball. He can do both and when you can do both, it puts defenses a lot more in a bind and gives us a lot more options.”
McCaffrey has 74 receptions, including five touchdowns this season. (Jonathan Dyer / Imagn Images)
McKinnon, however, suffered a season-ending ACL injury on the last play of a late-August practice and was never a factor for the 49ers.
The team got excellent production from Raheem Mostert late in 2019, but Mostert was injured for most of the next two seasons. The injury bug bit so deeply into the running back room in 2021, in fact, that the 49ers started using receiver Deebo Samuel as a tailback, a move that helped propel them into the playoffs that year.
With McCaffrey, who’d surpassed 1,000 yards in both rushing and receiving in 2019, Shanahan had the type of dual-threat weapon he thought he’d have with McKinnon. McCaffrey underscored that in his first start for the 49ers, scoring a touchdown as a runner, catcher, and passer in a 31-14 win over the Rams.
The 49ers went 10-1 with McCaffrey to close out the season.
Trade helped the Panthers land Young
Weirdly, the Panthers’ run game didn’t suffer in the immediate aftermath of the McCaffrey trade. After Wilks took over, offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo went to more of a downhill rushing attack featuring D’Onta Foreman and Chuba Hubbard. Wilks wasn’t sold on the Panthers’ QBs, but he kept the Panthers in games with defense and a clock-controlling, rushing attack. Foreman and Hubbard both topped 100 yards in a Christmas Eve win over Detroit in which the Panthers finished with a franchise-record 320 yards. As far as finding a running back with McCaffrey’s dual-threat abilities, Rico Dowdle is probably their closest facsimile. But McCaffrey’s receiving skills put him on another level.
The Panthers used all four of the picks they received from the 49ers in other deals. Fitterer included the second-round selection as part of the package he sent to Chicago for the No. 1 pick in 2023, which the Panthers used to draft Bryce Young. The Panthers used the third- and fourth-rounders to move up into the third round for Oregon edge rusher D.J. Johnson, who was a bust. The Panthers waived Johnson in September after he managed just a half-sack in 31 games in Carolina. The final pick from the McCaffrey trade went to the New York Giants in a fifth-round pick swap as part of the deal for Burns when the Panthers finally traded the edge rusher in 2024.
On the first night of the 2024 draft, current GM Dan Morgan sent the fifth-round pick the Panthers acquired from the Giants to Buffalo to move up one spot (but into the first round) and draft wide receiver Xavier Legette. So the Panthers essentially utilized the McCaffrey picks as ammo to help them land:
• Young, who’s helped get the Panthers in playoff contention and is coming off a career day in Atlanta when he threw for 448 yards to break Cam Newton’s single-game, franchise record.
• Legette, who’s been overshadowed by rookie Tetairoa McMillan but has had a couple of big games as WR2.
• Johnson, who’s worked out for a couple of teams but remains a free agent following his Sept. 30 release.
‘One of a kind’
George Kittle, whose locker is next to McCaffrey’s, was the first 49er to call him after the trade. The two had met at a Nike event years earlier and had struck up a relationship then.
“I was playing video games with all my friends from back home,” Kittle said. “And then one of them said, ‘Hey, you just traded for Christian McCaffrey.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, funny joke.’ And they said, ‘No, look it up.’ And then I called (McCaffrey) immediately and he said that I was the first person to call him — before Kyle and John (Lynch) did. So, shoutout to my friends back in Nashville for being on their phones while they’re playing video games. No wonder they’re not pulling their weight when we’re playing ‘Call of Duty’.”
Kittle and left tackle Trent Williams both call McCaffrey “one of a kind” because of his health regimen, work habits and mindset. Shanahan called McCaffrey a “psycho in a good way,” and teammates say the running back’s process is infectious.
McCaffery has also fit in well in the locker room with his sense of humor and dominance in chess and word games.
Even better, McCaffey’s arrival has opened up the 49ers’ offense as teams have to account for the running back coming out of the backfield.
“If you look at our offense last year when Christian doesn’t play to this year, when he does play, and just the amount of things that we are allowed to do because of how talented he is, that’s what Christian brings to the table,” Kittle said. “All the routes he runs, how good he is in the outside zone, how good he is getting downhill …
“Watch how he rides the wave of an outside zone and then figures out how to cut up inside … there’s not a lot of people who can do what he does. He’s selfless and does everything that we want him to do and he’s better than everybody else at doing it.”
“He’s the most consistent player I’ve been around,” Shanahan added. “He just allows you to stay on track. He gets every yard in the run game and more and what he does in the pass game … it’s rare that you’re going to throw a ball to him and not get a completion.”
Backup quarterback Mac Jones would call McCaffrey his “security blanket” in the eight games he played in this season.
It’s only natural that a former team may miss their security blanket. Or admitting that it’s cool playing against the team that drafted you. McCaffrey may own up to that someday, but not today.
“It’s a big game for all of us … just like they all are,” he said.
