Inman: Kittle’s place in 49ers’ lore is secure but contract issue looms
SANTA CLARA – George Kittle will charge Monday night onto the only home field he’s known as one of the NFL’s marquee players, the 49ers’ crowd will go wild, and the stage will be set, yet again.
The show goes on, even if the 49ers (6-9) are ending their NFC Championship reign and perhaps passing the torch to Levi’s Stadium’s final visitors this season, the Detroit Lions (13-2).
Kittle is 33 yards shy of his fourth 1,000-yard season, in an eight-year career that will garner him more All-Pro and Pro Bowl honors.
“I’m just very excited I got to spend eight years with the San Francisco 49ers, hopefully will continue to play here, because it’s a storied franchise,” Kittle said Friday when asked about his place among NFL all-time time ends.
This can not be his farewell game, right?
Look, he isn’t saying that, and he said to wait until the offseason to publicly ask him about his contact, which runs through 2025 at a $14.4 million salary — a few million shy of Travis Kelce’s market-leading price among tight ends.
After Christian McCaffrey and Trent Williams leveraged their elite play into extensions prior to this season, it’s obvious Kittle can and should do the same, for a franchise indebted to his production, leadership and standard-setting ways.
“Dude, he’s been great to me regardless of the circumstances of winning or losing,” Brock Purdy said. “He sees something in me that’s pretty good. And he’s just been nothing but great encouragement to me. He’s real to me, about what I can do and where I can get better. He’s real and that’s why I love him.”
For all the anticipation of Purdy’s blockbuster extension that can come as soon as the season ends, Kittle can strong-arm the 49ers’ brass into a deal more than any other player, all due respect to pending free agents Dre Greenlaw, Charvarius Ward, Aaron Banks, and Talanoa Hufanga.
“More than anything, he’s a guy that’s going to do anything for you when you step on the field. Off the field he’s got your back,” Purdy added. “And for our team, man, we’ve been in some tough situations this year and that dude has been one of the dudes that comes to work every single day.”
Kittle’s work this game likely will be to help block amid a patchwork offensive line with three new starters. That role is not taken lightly by Kittle, nor is his more renown efforts as one of the franchise’s all-time best receivers.
“Hopefully I can eventually catch T.O.,” said Kittle, whose 528 receptions and 7,241 yards rank third in 49ers’ receiving history behind only Jerry Rice and Terrell Owens. “I don’t think I’ll ever catch Jerry Rice on anything but that’s totally fine, I’m OK with that. I don’t think I want to play that long.”
Kittle trails Owens by 64 catches and 1,331 yards for the No. 2 spots behind Rice (1,281 catches, 19,247 yards).
He is the only tight end in 49ers history to reach the 1,000-yard mark, doing so in 2018, ’19, ’23, and, in 33 more yards, this season. The only other tight ends in NFL history with four 1,000-yard seasons: Kelce (seven), Tony Gonzalez (four), Rob Gronkowski (four), and, Jason Witten (four).
“I’ll look back on that whenever I’m done playing,” said Kittle, noting his longevity is “until the wheels fall off or until my wife tells me to stop playing.”
This season, he leads the 49ers with 68 catches, 967 yards and eight touchdowns. His perennial goal: 75 catches, 1,000 yards, 10 touchdowns.
“I’d rather be winning football games but to have that (1,000-yard milestone) as a cherry on top is awesome,” Kittle said. “The more seasons you can stack up like that, the more fun things you can do down the road.”
It’s a road that leads to Canton, Ohio and the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Disclaimer: Kittle wrote a foreword for Cam Inman’s recently published book “The Franchise: San Francisco 49ers”.