With his receiving contribution, CMC recorded his 50th career game with 50-plus receiving yards and joined Larry Centers (55) and Hall of Famer Marshall Faulk as the only players in league history with 50 or more games with 50-plus receiving yards. Now with 81 receptions, McCaffrey also leads the league in that category.
If McCaffrey finishes the season leading the league in catches, he will become the first quarterback to do so since 49ers legend Roger Craig in 1985.
In 2019 with the Panthers, McCaffrey joined Faulk and Craig as the only NFL quarterbacks to ever record 1,000 yards rushing and 1,000 yards receiving in the same season.
With 796 rushing yards (tied for 10th in the NFL) and 785 receiving yards after Monday, McCaffrey is five games away from potentially becoming the first player to accomplish the feat twice.
While that impressive 2019 campaign was the hallmark of his tenure in Carolina, McCaffrey is now very much the engine of the 49ers offense. He is coming off a 2024 season where injuries limited him to four games. Thus, there will always be a concern with the workload given to McCaffrey, who has twice previously led the league in rushing (2019 and 2023) and followed each of those seasons with years in which he was limited to fewer than five games due to injury.
So far so good for McCaffrey and the 49ers, though, with the quarterback’s latest example of incredible durability and production at the expense of his former team, which traded him to the 49ers during the 2022 season.
“Right when he got traded and he got here, Jimmy (Garoppolo) was going through the starter and backup stuff, like I was the one helping Christian as much as I could, going through plays and stuff after practice and meeting a little extra and going over things,” Purdy recalled. “So you could tell he was on top and I was like, man, it’s Christian McCaffrey. Like an All-Pro running back and everything, I wasn’t really sure how he was going to be but he acted like he was a rookie in terms of wanting to learn, wanting to know all the aspects of the offense and details.
There was some emotion Monday night for McCaffrey, but that did nothing to slow him down as he continues a second season that is on track to make more history.