49ers HC Kyle Shanahan says “It looks like” Brandon Aiyuk has a torn ACL

To say that the San Francisco 49ers have been bitten by the injury bug would be an understatement of the season. The top-heavy roster, which relies on top talent, was missing several of the NFL's best players at their respective positions.

This is not a team plagued by injury bugs. The Niners are trapped in a beehive.

On Sunday, the Niners were without their two all-everything wide receivers for part, if not all, of the game. Kyle Shanahan was asked during his post-game press conference if emotions were building up over all the injuries:

“Yes, that always applies to anyone involved with the NFL. I know a lot of teams are struggling with this, not every team, but we're struggling with it hard at the moment and today it got even worse, so it's tough.”

Shanahan announced that the team learned of Deebo Samuel's illness on Sunday morning. When asked to describe what Samuel was going through, Shanahan said, “The throat, stomach and everything else was really exhausted – I had trouble breathing. He couldn't catch his breath, so he couldn't fight through it. When he had difficulty breathing, we had to shut him down.”

Looking at the footage of Brandon Aiyuk being hit in the knee in a tackle, there are fears that it is a serious knee injury. Here's what Shanahan said about the possibility that Aiyuk's injury could be something other than a torn ACL:

“That's what it looks like. But we don't know for sure, we do the tests and everything with our hands, the trainers and stuff, all that. That's what we fear. This is what it looks like. But we've been wrong before. I pray we are.”

If the 49ers are right, that would be an outlier for a player who has virtually no injury history. Prior to Week 7, Aiyuk had only missed a few games throughout his career, each in his rookie season, and only one was due to injury.

Shanahan said, “It depends on what's available,” noting the risk and chance of potentially trading for a wide receiver at the deadline if the 49ers get bad news about Aiyuk's knee.