To watch Christian McCaffrey gallop through defenses, plow over defenders and make grown men whiff in space, you wouldn’t know that the San Francisco 49ers running back was coming off a season-ending injury in 2024.
For players, especially those who rely on speed and agility, coming back from an injury-marred campaign like CMC dealt with — missing the first eight games with Achilles tendinitis and ending the year with a PCL injury that sideswiped the final five — it usually takes time to get up to speed. A quarter of a year, half a year, sometimes a full year until we see players who’ve missed that much time bounce back to form.
McCaffrey is built different.
The running back leads the NFL with 185 touches and 981 scrimmage yards in 2025. He is No. 1 in carries with 132 through seven weeks and third in catches with 53 (behind receivers Ja’Marr Chase, 58, and Puka Nacua, 54). His 516 receiving yards put him eighth among all players and are the second-most by an RB in the first seven games of the season in the Super Bowl era, behind only Alvin Kamara‘s 556 in 2020.
Normally, we might not blink at McCaffrey churning out yards at this rate. He’s done it before. Coming off an injury changes the perception. If he keeps up this pace, McCaffrey would be the first player in NFL history to lead the league in scrimmage yards the season after missing 12-plus games the previous year, per NFL Research.
The Niners back is the second player in NFL history with 450-plus rush yards and 450-plus receiving yards in the first seven games of a season, matching only Marshall Faulk’s 2000 season. Faulk won the AP NFL Most Valuable Player award that year.
Per Next Gen Stats, McCaffrey leads the NFL with 46 missed tackles forced in 2025, just ahead of Jonathan Taylor‘s 44.