The Tight End Room Is Broken, and the Receiver Depth Behind It Is Thinner Still

George Kittle caught 58 passes for 634 yards and seven touchdowns in 12 games last season before his Achilles ended everything. Jake Tonges, working behind him, quietly built something worth keeping: 40 catches, 366 yards, five scores in the same number of games. That's not a backup doing backup things — that's a functioning second option in Kyle Shanahan's system, a player who understood the offense well enough to produce in it. He's on injured reserve now. So is De'Zhaun Stribling. And Kittle's own return from an Achilles tear remains, generously, a question mark heading into the season.

What's left at tight end, per the depth chart, is Luke Farrell and Jack Stoll. Farrell's season line — 12 catches for 86 yards and two touchdowns in 15 games — tells you exactly what he is: a blocker who can catch a short route when asked, not someone you build a drive around. Stoll is further down the chart. This is the room San Francisco is asking to replace what Kittle and Tonges gave them together, and the arithmetic doesn't work.

In my piece earlier this week on the receiver situation, I focused on how the Tonges injury collapses the depth behind Evans and Pearsall. The tighter problem, the one I didn't fully reckon with, is that Tonges was doing double duty — he was the receiving tight end the offense leaned on when Kittle was unavailable, and he was the safety valve in two-tight-end sets that gave Shanahan flexibility in his formations. Losing him doesn't just thin one position. It removes a chess piece that served two functions simultaneously.

The signing of Mike Evans addresses the wide receiver vacancy in a real way — Evans has been one of the most reliable contested-catch targets in the league across a long career, and his addition gives Purdy a genuine outside threat. But Evans cannot line up at tight end. He cannot replace what Tonges gave this offense in the seam, in the red zone, in the play-action game that Shanahan runs through that position. The offseason move that was supposed to shore up the passing game was always calibrated for the receiver problem, not the tight end problem. Now both problems exist simultaneously, and only one was addressed.

The underlying numbers from last season should be making the front office uncomfortable right now. San Francisco's 12-5 record rested heavily on a 5-1 mark in games decided by seven points or fewer — an 83 percent close-game win rate that their point differential didn't fully support. Teams that win that way tend to regress. The cushion those clutch wins created is gone; the margin for error in 2026 is already smaller than the record implied. Losing two contributors who were integral to the offense's ability to function at full complexity makes that margin smaller still. The 49ers needed a clean offseason to build on what they had. Instead, they're entering the year with the tight end room broken and the receiver depth behind it thinner than it's been in years.