Camp kicks off Saturday at the SAP Training Center in Santa Clara and runs through August 12, and for once the 49ers are walking in with most of their stars actually able to walk. Nick Bosa, Fred Warner, George Kittle and Brock Purdy are all trending toward being available at or shortly after the start, which is a nice change of pace for a team that spent most of 2025 running a M*A*S*H unit at every level of the roster.
The headline name is still Christian McCaffrey, and not because anyone doubts he's healthy. He is. The question is what 450 touches in a Comeback Player of the Year age-29 season does to a running back who turns 30 this year. History is not on his side here — outside of Walter Payton's 1985 season, no 30-plus running back has come close to replicating a workload like that the following year. San Francisco reportedly plans to manage him carefully through the rest of camp, which is the kind of sentence that should make anyone drafting him in the top 10 sit up.
That hasn't stopped the market from treating McCaffrey like a lock. Early ADP has him going around pick 7 or 8 overall, with some boards pushing him into the top 3 running backs off the board outright. That's an aggressive price for a guy whose 2025 breakout leaned heavily on volume that the 49ers themselves seem nervous about repeating. If San Francisco actually follows through on load management, McCaffrey becomes one of the riskier top-10 picks in fantasy this summer — the kind of name that shows up on bust lists not because the talent is gone, but because the touches might be.
Ricky Pearsall is the other name worth circling, and his camp arc is basically the opposite of McCaffrey's. Ankle and knee injuries wrecked his 2025 after a promising start, but the target tree around him just got a serious pruning — Jauan Jennings and Brandon Aiyuk are both gone, and Kittle is working back from a torn Achilles. San Francisco patched the receiver room with Mike Evans and Christian Kirk over the offseason, but that actually helps Pearsall's profile: Evans commands the top corner and safety help on the outside, which should free Pearsall up in the slot and on the backside against lesser coverage.
The fantasy community hasn't fully agreed on what to do with that opportunity yet. Some rankings have Pearsall going as early as round 6 as a No. 3 receiver in most formats; others still have him sliding to rounds 10 or 11. That gap is the buy window — a 25-year-old former first-round pick who led the roster in yards per game across four healthy outings last season, now getting a clearer route and a suddenly thinner target board, is exactly the kind of profile that gets expensive by August. The catch is durability: Pearsall has already missed 14 games in two seasons, so there's real bust risk baked into the sleeper case too.
Purdy's situation is quieter but matters just as much for anyone building around this offense. He's one of the injury names ESPN flagged as trending toward availability for camp, and a clean run of camp reps matters for both his own QB market and for every pass-catcher tied to him — Pearsall, Evans, Kirk and Kittle all need Purdy on schedule and throwing without limitations for their fantasy ceilings to hold up.
Beyond the skill positions, the roster battles worth tracking are less fantasy-relevant but tell you something about where this team's floor is. Left guard is wide open between Robert Jones, Connor Colby, rookie Carver Willis and Brett Toth, and safety is similarly unsettled behind Ji'Ayir Brown, Malik Mustapha, Marques Sigle and newcomer Ashtyn Davis. A shaky offensive line interior is exactly the kind of thing that can quietly cap McCaffrey's efficiency even if his touch count stays reasonable, so keep an eye on how that battle resolves before locking in draft-day plans.
For fantasy purposes, the plan of attack out of camp is straightforward: treat McCaffrey as a talented but overpriced name given the workload questions and age curve, and treat Pearsall as the value the market hasn't fully priced yet given the target-share math. Watch practice reports for how the 49ers actually deploy McCaffrey in camp reps and whether Purdy looks fully unrestricted — those two data points will move both players' draft stock more than anything written about them this summer.