On what should have been the happiest day of his life, Christian McCaffrey was thinking about football technique — at least according to his head coach.
San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan knows how competitive McCaffrey, 28, is, which means his star running back probably had other things on his mind on the day he married Olivia Culpo in June.
“When he’s probably walking down the aisle to get married, he’s probably thinking about his feet and how to do routes, no offense to Olivia,” Shanahan, who was in attendance at McCaffrey’s nuptials, told reporters on Wednesday, August 21. “But he’s obsessed with it.”
Shanahan, 44, added, “When you take every rep, every walk-through, everything you do, you’re just so deliberate and everything.”
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McCaffrey’s tenacity and work ethic has been forced to take a bit of a backseat during this spring’s training camp as the 2023 NFL Offensive Player of the Year deals with a calf strain.
“When you do get in these situations where you do get hurt and can’t go do all that stuff, at least he’s put the work in before,” Shanahan said. “So that stuff does come back fast. He understands what it takes to play in this game, especially at the level he does.”
The 49ers open the regular season against Aaron Rodgers and the New York Jets on Monday, September 9. Earlier this month, McCaffrey told SiriusXM NFL Radio that he doesn’t expect his injury to prevent him from being ready to play.
As for the wedding — which went down June 29 in Rhode Island — a couple of McCaffrey’s teammates recently gave Us Weekly a behind-the-scenes re-telling of the raucous festivities.
According to 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk, McCaffrey’s former Carolina Panthers teammate Greg Olsen stole the show when he grabbed a microphone and employed the services of the groom.
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“He had a phenomenal time. Him and Christian were up at the bar,” Juszczyk, 33, told Us at the premiere of Netflix’s Receiver in July. “They were rapping a little bit of Eminem to everybody. It was phenomenal. Well-received.”
McCaffrey and Juszczyk’s 49ers teammate George Kittle was forced to become proactive at the ceremony when he realized they didn’t have any Bud Light available.
“I bought all of the Bud Light at the entire hotel,” Kittle, 30, told Us at the Receiver premiere.
As for the bill, Kittle joked, “I just got McCaffrey to pay for it.”
