Samuel out, aggravates hamstring injury
Deebo Samuel took the football, ran left, got pushed out of bounds and, bam, there went his left hamstring.
So it was on Oct. 25, with the San Francisco 49ers leading 30- 6 in the fourth quarter at New England. This wasn’t just another injury in the Niners’ season full of them. Since then, the 49ers have gone 1- 5, surrendered their NFC West crown and won’t have Samuel for their remaining three games after he aggravated that hamstring on Sunday’s first snap against Washington.
“We’d have to make the playoffs for him to come back,” coach Kyle Shanahan said Monday.
Samuel’s second season, thus, was abbreviated to just seven games, 33 catches, 391 receiving yards, eight carries (26 yards) and one overall touchdown.
Foot and hamstring injuries did him in, and Shanahan emphasized Monday to Samuel how his health suffered from a lack of conditioning, because he was so busy rehabilitating.
“Every time Deebo’s come back, he’s gotten re-injured, and it’s because he hasn’t been in a position to really be in great football shape,” Shanahan said.
“I was telling Deebo this morning — because he was so down that he might end up missing the rest of the year — I said, ‘I know it seems like a bad thing but it’s positive thing if you make sure that this hamstring injury is what you learn for the rest of your life on why every day in this league matters and how much you have to work in the offseason, how much you
have to take care of yourself, so you can play for a full year.’
“That’s the only thing that’s going to hold a guy back like that.”
Samuel missed the season’s first three game so he could ramp up his conditioning after missing training camp because of a June foot fracture.
He was the catalyst in their past two wins: at New England and Nov. 29 at the Los Angeles Rams. In between those wins, Samuel missed three straight losses with his strained hamstring, which he aggravated on a 9-yard run on Sunday’s first snap against Washington.
Should Samuel have come out of that New England game earlier? Like when Jeff Wilson exited midway through the third quarter to remind the 49ers of their fragility this hard-luck season?
That hindsight is too easy. The 49ers were routing the NFL’s most dominant franchise of this century when they called for Samuel in the closing rounds. They greedily wanted more, to provide false hope for the impending doom they faced against Seattle, then Green Bay, then New Orleans. That ensuing three-game skid, against their biggest NFC rivals this decade, foretold more disappointment.
No one anticipated a sudden relocation to Arizona for December, nor back-toback defeats to Buffalo and Washington to essentially take the 49ers out of the playoff picture.
Now they forge ahead without Samuel.
But they do have Brandon Aiyuk, whose stats indicate a promising career, not that they’ve come easy. “I definitely wouldn’t say it was easy,” Aiyuk said of his rookie year. “Been through a whole lot of stuff this season.”
Ditto, Samuel.