Juszczyk’s versatile vision
Allpurpose fullback showed high football IQ as a kid in Ohio
When 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk was a sophomore at Cloverleaf High in northeast Ohio, former teacher and coach Dave Ward said his player would arrive for football film sessions, quietly reach into his gym bag and take out a stack of notecards.
“He was taking notes on every player that would affect his play the next night,” Ward said. “He was making notes about steps they’d take, tendencies they had, tells they had.”
When Juszczyk was a senior, the team held a banquet. And Juszczyk, former Cloverleaf coach Kevin Gault recalled, showed up carrying a full filing cabinet drawer.
“He’d taken notes on every player he’d played against,” Gault said, “and he passed them down to the underclassmen. They were better than the scouting reports we had.”
Now in the NFL, Juszczyk’s cerebral approach is a gift that keeps giving — allowing the 49ers to use the
versatile socalled “offensive weapon” in a variety of alignments and formations as a linchpin of the running game that has helped carry them to the Super Bowl on Sunday.
How extensive are Juszczyk’s responsibilities in the offense from week to week? Before the NFC Championship Game against the Packers, 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan said coaches need to be mindful at times of not overloading Juszczyk in the game plan.
“We put a lot on him — and we haven’t put too much on him yet,” Shanahan said. “He’s been able to handle it each time. I’ll say that’s because of his Harvard education. But he’s a hell of a football player who doesn’t get nervous about anything. And he works very hard throughout the week to understand everything.”
Juszczyk’s contributions aren’t exactly unsung — he was voted to the Pro Bowl for the fourth time this season — but they can go unquantified. Juszczyk does not have a rushing attempt or a catch in these playoffs. This season, he totaled three carries for 7 yards and 20 receptions for 239 yards.
Given the 49ers’ affinity for twoback sets, though, Juszczyk has been on the field for 90 of 126 offensive snaps in the postseason. And he has often been lead blocker for a rushing attack that gained 471 yards in wins over the Vikings and Packers.
Last week, Juszczyk, a former high school wildcat quarterback who had 22 touchdown catches at Harvard, was asked if he ever feels unfulfilled playing 50 snaps in a game without touching the ball.
“No,” Juszczyk said. “Because usually we’ve won that game.”
Those who knew a younger Juszczyk might recognize the resolve.
Gault met Juszczyk long before coaching him. As a thirdgrader, Juszczyk began showing up to Cloverleaf practices “every day” to watch his older brother. So Gault made him a manager.
“He wasn’t like a normal thirdgrader,” Gault said. “He was just such a mature kid.”
When Juszczyk reached high school, Gault said, Cloverleaf football would hold training sessions at 6 a.m., five days a week, in the offseason. Juszczyk also played basketball and was a thrower in track and field. But he didn’t skip the early morning workouts.
Basketball “game day or not, he was there at 6 o’clock in the morning,” Gault said.
Ward taught Juszczyk at age 12 and describes him as having “a sense of determined purpose.” A few years later, Ward said, Juszczyk visited his classroom carrying several early college recruiting letters.
“He said, ‘Hey Coach, you got a minute? I got some stuff in the mail and I’m not sure exactly how we should go with this.’ ”
Ward, an influential figure for Juszczyk who officiated the fullback’s wedding last summer, said that began a custom of weekly visits while Juszczyk was at Cloverleaf that expanded into “just talking about life stuff.”
“He was already there so this has nothing to do with me, but we’d talk about integrity, what it means to be a man as far as being a husband and a father, what your word means, those kinds of things,” Ward said.
By his senior year, Juszczyk had grown from a 135pound freshman to nearer his current listed size (6foot1, 235 pounds) and was playing multiple positions on offense as well as linebacker. Going into that year, Cloverleaf had never made the playoffs. In its regularseason finale, Cloverleaf faced undefeated Highland High with a playoff spot on the line.
In double overtime, with Cloverleaf in position to try a gamewinning field goal, Gault called a direct snap to Juszczyk to place the ball in the middle of the field.
“He says, ‘I’m going to score, coach,’ ” Gault said. “We said, ‘No you’re not.’ ”
Juszczyk took the snap and ran for the winning 16yard touchdown.
“I shook my head and said, ‘I’ll be damned, he’s going to succeed no matter what,’ ” Gault said.
In a bit of foreshadowing, Juszczyk’s versatility caught the eye of Harvard head football coach Tim Murphy, who works with the program’s tight ends and Hbacks.
“You could see his physicality, you could see his athleticism,” Murphy said. “You could envision he would make a sort of perfect Hback for us.”
Juszczyk received few Division I offers and said other schools wanted him to play linebacker. At Harvard, Juszczyk moved around the offense, lining up as an inline tight end, a fullback, in the slot and out wide. Murphy said players who fill that role at Harvard often don’t grasp the full skill set until their junior season.
“He took to it right away,” Murphy said. “He was such a perfectionist — a tough, physical kid, but also a perfectionist — that he mastered all of those positions for us at a very young age.”
While Juszczyk spent his first four NFL seasons with Baltimore, the lineage to the 49ers is clear. According to Sharp Football Stats, the 49ers this season used a fullback on 26 percent of their offensive snaps, most in the NFL. But Juszczyk played nearly 37 percent of the offensive snaps and said he views his hybrid capacity with the 49ers as “the same thing I really did in college.”
Juszczyk said Shanahan’s game plans “count on me to make a lot of adjustments,” and acknowledged “there are tougher weeks than others.”
“But after a day or two of getting to absorb it, usually I don’t have a problem with it,” he said.
In attending Harvard, where he majored in economics, and adopting a fullback position that has phased out of many NFL offenses, Juszczyk said he “actually did” see a route to an NFL career.
“I wasn’t going to tell people that early on,” Juszczyk said. “I just wanted to get my foot in the door in any way possible. … I (thought), as long as I can get eyes on me, I know that I can show something that someone in the NFL is going to say, ‘This guy can be valuable for us.’ ”
Those words would likely resonate with Ward, who will be on hand in Miami on Sunday to see Juszczyk play in his first Super Bowl.
“Kyle’s drive from within was what set him apart from a lot of people,” Ward said.
“I always thought he had a vision in his head that maybe only he could see at that point. And he was always working toward that, quietly.”