Wake-up call for tight end
After three seasons at Iowa, 49ers rookie tight end George Kittle was a redshirt junior coming off a one-catch season who felt the clock ticking on his college career. So he set an alarm. Kittle, who was no stranger to Iowa City’s party scene, set a self-imposed, pre-midnight curfew while seriously scaling back his social life. His realization: His long nights were tied to his limited snaps.
“Yeah, I set an alarm on my phone,” Kittle said. “You always want to hang out with your friends and teammates — you’re with them all the time. But it was just like, ‘This is more important. What mat-
ters more?’ And that was pretty easy for me.”
Kittle’s decision to forfeit some good times has put him in a good spot.
After assuming a prominent role in his final two college seasons, Kittle is a fifth-round pick whose impressive offseason has him poised to play plenty as a rookie.
On Tuesday, the 49ers traded Vance McDonald, their projected starting tight end, to the Steelers. On Wednesday, general manager John Lynch said the 49ers’ confidence in Kittle was a factor in their decision to deal McDonald.
“We’re just extremely high on him,” Lynch said on KNBR. “He’s shown us he can be an all-around tight end. He blocks very well. He showed up here and it wasn’t too big for him.”
Kittle left little doubt about his blocking ability at Iowa, where he estimates he served as an extension of the offensive line on 80 percent of his snaps. Kittle had just 42 catches in his final two seasons, but his robust yards-per-catch average (14.4) and 10 touchdowns hinted at his underutilized play-making ability.
At the NFL combine, Kittle (6-foot-4 and 250 pounds) ranked third among tight ends in the 40-yard dash (4.52 seconds) and broad jump (11 feet).
During offseason workouts, 49ers quarterback Brian Hoyer, a Michigan State alum who played against Iowa in the Big 10, was surprised by Kittle’s route-running ability, particularly given the stereotype of the Hawkeyes’ tight ends.
Hoyer facetiously told Kittle that he was going to contact Iowa offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz, whom he knew from their time together with the New England Patriots.
“I said, ‘I’m going to text him and tell him that they were using you the wrong way,’ ” Hoyer said in June. “You think of Iowa, you think of these big, blocking tight ends. He has a really good football awareness; a feel for where to break, how to break, read zones.”
Kittle dealt with a hamstring injury for much of training camp and said he wasn’t fully healthy until just before last week’s third preseason game. In the second preseason game, he had a 29-yard catch-and-run touchdown during which he ran over 185-pound Broncos cornerback Chris Lewis-Harris.
“I think George is what we’d like to say deceptively athletic, which I think you saw on his touchdown against the Broncos,” 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk said. “He was stumbling, falling — it looked like he was going to run out of bounds — and then, all of a sudden, he’s in the end zone. I think George is a great route runner and he’s very physical. I can understand why they have a lot of confidence in him. I think he’s going to do really well.”
The 49ers must pare their roster to 53 players on Saturday, and Kittle appears to be the only tight end on the roster with maximum job security. Logan Paulsen, Garrett Celek and Blake Bell are probably fighting for two spots.
Kittle has reached this point at the embryonic stage of his NFL career partly because of a conversation he had beyond the midway stage of his college career.
In the offseason before his redshirt junior year, he spoke with former Colts linebacker Pat Angerer, an Iowa alum who was back on campus to work in the Hawkeyes’ strength-and-conditioning department.
Angerer recovered from a slow start to his college career to become a second-round pick in 2010.
“He didn’t play until halfway through his junior year, and I asked him what he changed,” Kittle said. “He was extreme in college — he was a partier. And he said, ‘I cut these things out of my life because I wanted to play and that was more important to me than anything else.’ So I took his words to heart and that really helped me out.”
Indeed, for Kittle it was a life-changing conversation — the moment he woke up, and then set an alarm.