One linebacker returns and another quits — a final letdown in the 49ers’ season from hell

George Kittle is one of just two 49ers players who has been with the team since 2017, Kyle Shanahan’s first year as coach. He’s spoken to the media hundreds of times in the eight seasons since, which have featured more peaks of exhilaration and valleys of devastation than many works of dramatized fiction.

Not once during any of his press conferences at the Levi’s Stadium auditorium or media scrums in crowded locker rooms had Kittle broadcast clear anger. He’d inevitably shown hints of sadness during a run that has included two Super Bowl losses, a pair NFC title game defeats, and this torturous string of 2024 defeats. But anger? That had simply not been an emotion the outside world could associate with Kittle, a superstar known for his jovial disposition and avoidance of bad days.

Thursday night, though, made it impossible for Kittle and the 49ers to escape unrestrained negativity. A 12-6 loss to the Los Angeles Rams — which all but mathematically knocked them out of playoff contention — was low-lighted by what the locker room considered unimaginable: a player, linebacker De’Vondre Campbell, quitting on the team in the middle of a close loss.

According to Shanahan, Campbell retreated to the locker room in the third quarter after refusing to fill in for Dre Greenlaw, who’d returned from injury Thursday and taken over the starting spot Campbell had held for the first 13 games of the season. A sore knee prevented Greenlaw from continuing. That, combined with a neck injury to linebacker Dee Winters, prompted the 49ers to call on Campbell.

“He said he didn’t want to play today,” Shanahan said bluntly.

And Kittle, for the first time in the public eye, didn’t hide his anger.

“It’s one person who just decided not to play for his teammates,” Kittle said, long after the game ended. “It’s more of one person, as [Charvarius Ward] said, making a selfish decision. And I’m with [Ward] on that. I’ve never been around anybody that’s ever done that and I hope I’m never around anybody that does that again.

“… I don’t like distractions on the sideline. I think that’s ignorant, and I think it’s just dumb, just stupid. It’s very immature. I just don’t see how you can do something like that to your team.”

Ward had spoken a few minutes earlier in the 49ers’ locker room. He, too, didn’t hold back on Campbell’s exit.

“He’s a professional,” Ward said. “He’s been playing for a long time. If he didn’t want to play, he shouldn’t have dressed out. He could’ve told them before the game. So I feel like that was some selfish s— that he did. It definitely hurt the team because Dee went down and we needed a linebacker. So for him to do that, that’s some sucker stuff to me, in my opinion. He’s probably going to get cut soon.”

Shanahan, unsurprisingly, was also fuming as he discussed the situation. The coach didn’t outright say the 49ers would release Campbell, who was no longer in the locker room once media arrived after the game. But Shanahan did say that the 49ers will “figure out something” regarding Campbell. The 49ers signed the linebacker to a one-year deal worth nearly $5 million back in March, right around the time Campbell was taking to social media to blast the Green Bay Packers, his former team.

Is Shanahan, whose 49ers are now mired at 6-8 after losing four of their past five games, worried about losing the locker room?

“[We] haven’t lost anybody,” Shanahan said. “If somebody doesn’t want to play football … our team, myself, we know how we feel about that. I don’t want to talk about that anymore.”

Some 49ers, notably edge rusher Nick Bosa and linebackers Fred Warner and Demetrius Flannigan-Fowles — who instead replaced Greenlaw — declined to specifically comment on Campbell. But others, including cornerback Deommodore Lenoir, took to social media to voice their displeasure.

Offensive lineman Jon Feliciano, who recently attempted but failed to return from knee surgery, posted — in obvious reference to Campbell’s departure — that he’d “do unspeakable things” to play.

And that struck at the crux of the vexation in the 49ers’ locker room. This is a team that’s endured enormous hardship — from crushing defeat in Super Bowl LVIII to a slew of injuries to heart-shattering off-field tragedies — over the past calendar year. Yet many 49ers have, with an air of defiance, continued to fight through all these forms of tribulation.

Warner is playing on a fractured ankle. Running back Christian McCaffrey, before a knee injury landed him on injured reserve a second time, traveled all the way to Germany to seek treatment that would help him return faster from early-season Achilles tendinitis. Ward returned to the team in the midst of painstaking grief following the death of his one-year-old daughter, Amani Joy.

Campbell’s refusal to play juxtaposed most harshly with Greenlaw’s return against the Rams. That was an electric, 8-tackle exhibition that came 305 days after Greenlaw tore his Achilles in the Super Bowl. Count Greenlaw’s comeback as one of the 49ers’ many gritty fights through adversity this season.

“All I asked of my tight end room today was to play with one-fifth of the energy that Dre Greenlaw brings on every single snap,” Kittle said. “The energy he plays with, the violence he plays with on every single snap. The energy he brings to the entire team is infectious. It’s unique. It’s one of a kind. He’s an absolute unicorn of a football player. It was so fun to be able to see him play again tonight.”

It seems impossibly ironic now, given what transpired on Thursday, that Campbell was the player the 49ers signed to directly fill in for Greenlaw. Granted, Campbell wasn’t their first choice. That was linebacker Eric Kendricks, who agreed to terms with the 49ers but changed his mind and joined the Dallas Cowboys instead. But it was Campbell who let down the 49ers in the heart of a de facto do-or-die game, when Greenlaw’s status remained tenuous.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the 49ers turned to safety Talanoa Hufanga, yet another one of their players who’s fought through hardship to game action, to address the team after the game. Hufanga, who returned from a torn ACL in Week 2 only to tear a wrist ligament in Week 3, is back and playing with a protective club on his hand.

“He broke the team down after the game,” Kittle said. “And he said that his mindset and his attitude will be 100 percent effort on every single day, every practice, every single rep, and he will fight until the wheels fall off because he has been fighting his ass off to get back on the football field this year.”

Said Hufanga in the locker room: “The season’s not over. We still have games left to play, and if we don’t show up, there’s no reason to be here if we’re not going to do that. So I’m going to show up every day.”

That’s all the 49ers can do now, moving forward into the season’s final three games. The team will face major decisions on how to construct itself in the offseason that follows. But preserving the structural integrity of a damaged ship — a culture of high effort and uncompromising teamwork that Shanahan and general manager John Lynch have built since 2017 — is the priority that comes before that.

That’s why Kittle and many of the locker room’s leaders were so angry on Thursday night, and why Bosa reinforced Hufanga’s plan to fight through the finish line.

“That’s what the message is now,” Bosa said. “And we’re going to find out who wants to be a Niner.”