With first-round wideout Michael Crabtree sitting on a couch somewhere not in San Francisco, he has acquired a little more leverage for his contractual position.
Receiver Brandon Jones has a broken shoulder. And he’ll be out for a while.
“It’s going to be longer than a couple of weeks,” coach Mike Singletary said Friday, in comments circulated by the team. “It’s more like eight weeks. . . . We had the X-Ray this morning. [There’s] a little bit of a fracture there, so it’s going to be longer than we anticipated. But, we’ll work through it. The receivers that we’ve got here, we’re very confident in our guys here. They’ll continue to work, and thankfully we’ll get him back after that eight-week period.”
Singletary balked at the notion that Jones’ absence changes the team’s position as to Crabtree, the tenth overall pick in the draft.
“It doesn’t do anything, to be honest,” Singletary said. “As I said before, this is not a political speech. It’s the truth. We’ve got wide receivers that Jerry Sullivan is working his tail off with them. They’re growing, progressing. We’re fine for right now.”
But that doesn’t mean the Niners won’t be signing any other receivers to replace Jones, who won’t need surgery.
“At this point, we may or may not bring another receiver in and work him out and see what we have,” Singletary said. “But, there’s no sense of urgency in terms of doing anything right now, but continuing to work. As I’ve said before, we feel very good about what we have. It’s unfortunate that it happened to him, but we’re just going to keep working.”
Jones was signed as a free agent from the Titans. He was expected to serve as the No. 3 receiver.
He still might, but it won’t happen until October.
[UPDATE: Oops. I didn’t realize Rosenthal covered this one while the VW bus was rolling to Canton. Since there’s some stuff in there that wasn’t previously mentioned, we’ll leave it up.]