49ers tight end George Kittle isn’t going to win the NFL MVP award. He probably won’t even be in the conversation or garner any kind of significant votes. His dominance in his third season didn’t go entirely unnoticed though.
Pro Football Focus named Kittle the winner of their Dwight Stephenson Award, which they hand out to the player they deem to be the “best player in the NFL regardless of position and regardless of how much value he brought to the table.”
This is tough to argue with given what Kittle does for the 49ers as a blocker and receiver. His dominance at tight end is reaching all-time great levels and he’s only 26-years old. Kittle earned the best single-season grade PFF has ever given to a tight end, which includes every one of Rob Gronkowski’s seasons.
The 49ers’ third-year tight end failed to break his own record for receiving yards by a tight end, which he set last season, but he had a better year in 2019.
Despite missing two games, Kittle still posted 85 catches for 1,053 yards and five touchdowns. Two more games would’ve given him a career-high in catches, and may have given him a shot to eclipse his record 1,377 yards.
He also came up with maybe the play of the year when he carried three Saints on a long fourth-and-2 catch-and-run that put the 49ers in position to kick a game-winning field goal in New Orleans.
His prowess as a pass catcher was well-known, and one of the most dangerous elements of his game in head coach Kyle Shanahan’s offense, which regularly schemes the athletic tight end into space he quickly chews up after the catch.
This season was the emergence of the physically dominant version of the former Iowa Hawkeye. Kittle’s powerful, angry runs after the catch and absurdly dominant run blocks became regular fodder for NFL fans on the internet.
Calling him the best player in the league makes a lot of sense when ridding the prevailing notion that quarterback value elevates them into a different stratosphere of player evaluation.
Kevin Clark of the Ringer joined the Candlestick Chronicles podcast and gave a logical illustration of why he considers Kittle the best player in the league.
He posited that if every NFL player were cloned 53 times, and a person had to pick one player as an entire football team, the team with 53 George Kittles would be the best one.
For PFF, the logic was based on film review and their player-by-player grading system:
Kittle’s overall grade of 95.0 wasn’t just the best grade of any tight end in the game this season (by some distance), but was the best grade of any player at any position league-wide. A lot of players in the NFL had phenomenal seasons, but at the end of watching and grading every player on every play of the NFL season, George Kittle graded out as the best in football, and he rightfully deserves the Dwight Stephenson Award for his efforts.
While Kittle hasn’t been effective as a receiver in the playoffs – he has four catches for 35 yards in two games – he’s been key as a blocker in the 49ers’ rushing attack. His presence and pass catching ability also warps defenses and makes it harder for them to sell out to stop the run.
There aren’t a lot of things Kittle can’t do on a football field, and he acts as a lynchpin to one of the most effective, diverse offenses in the NFL. He’s also still young, too, which means the 49ers are in a position to have the best player in football on their team for the foreseeable future.
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