49ers Insider Matt Maiocco Talks McCaffrey, Kittle, Purdy & More with Rich

George Kittle is going to push to play Week 1 in Australia. Matt Maiocco does not think it happens.

The 49ers insider walked Rich through the reasoning on the show, and it started with what Kittle would not say. Asked directly about Week 1, Kittle was noncommittal. So Maiocco came at it from the side.

"I did ask him, would there be any reason for you to travel to Australia if you are not going to play in that game?" Maiocco said. "And he, without even hesitating, said, that wouldn't make sense, would it, to go to Australia."

Read the answer, not the non-answer. Maiocco did, and he came away convinced Kittle is already thinking along those lines.

Kittle also raised the shape of the calendar himself, unprompted. It is 17 games across 18 weeks, and the point is to be there for the back half of it.

"You want him to be ready throughout the entire season," Maiocco said. "Play, and when he gets on the field, stay on the field."

The arithmetic Maiocco laid out is hard to argue with. Holding Kittle out of the opener buys him 10 extra days of physical therapy and rehab. It also erases 32 hours of flight time from his legs.

"I think he's going to push for it," Maiocco said. "But it just seems to me that the wiser play would be just have him ready to go week two."

Then Rich turned the Australia trip around to the other sideline. Do the 49ers actually believe they are going to get off that plane and line up across from Aaron Donald?

"I think they believe it because they have to believe it," Maiocco said.

That is the part that reframes the whole opener. Maiocco described the planning logic as setting yourself up for the worst case, so that anything short of it lands as a bonus. If San Francisco prepares for Donald and he is not out there, the only way they were wrong works in their favor.

"They're thinking about the Rams every day," Maiocco said. "There's no doubt about it. It's a huge game. It's week one. It's what everybody's pointing to."

The scheme problem is the wrinkle worth sitting with. Maiocco credited the 49ers for the work they did during Donald's prime, when the plan was never to erase him but to mitigate what he could wreck. That job gets considerably harder when the man who is probably the best defensive player in the league is lined up next to a man who, coming back, might be the second best.

Myles Garrett is already on that front. Donald returning to it means San Francisco has to build a plan that accounts for both, and Maiocco was blunt that doing so is a different order of difficulty than accounting for one.