00:00Hey, are you ready for a quick Mike Evans appreciation hour?
00:03Would love it, yeah. A full hour of Mike Evans appreciation?
00:06No, no, no. Like, at this hour, let's do Mike Evans appreciation.
00:10It might only take four minutes. I don't know. I don't know.
00:13But I'd like to read some quotes to you from today.
00:16Inside the locker room of the San Francisco 49ers.
00:21And check this out.
00:23I think we already appreciated Mike Evans.
00:27Great player in this league.
00:28Then he shows up as a Niner.
00:30And he has had a very good start.
00:33Do I have this right?
00:35Has he scored a touchdown in every game?
00:36Did he score a touchdown week two?
00:38I know he did in Australia.
00:39I know he did last week.
00:41Did he score against...
00:42I don't think he did week two.
00:43Did he get to Miami?
00:44He didn't play out to the one on that crazy Brock.
00:46That's right.
00:47That's the highlight I'm thinking of where he went out at the one.
00:50Okay.
00:51So, Mike Evans is planning slash hoping to play.
00:55He is still in pain.
00:57There's no question about it.
00:59But they are putting some sort of a compression thing around his midsection.
01:06And he's planning to play and he says he has done so before.
01:09But check this out.
01:12Quote, it's my job.
01:14I take pride in trying to suit up every chance I get.
01:19If the injury isn't unbearable and you can't play through it, then I won't play.
01:27But if there's something I can play through, then I'm going to be there for my team as best I
01:33can.
01:34Mike Evans continually threw out quotes, and I'm going to read some more to you, that suggests what's motivating him
01:43here is not even really beating Denver.
01:46It's not stats.
01:47It's like, I owe this.
01:50I owe this to everybody in this room, that if I can do it at all, that, like, I got
01:56to do it.
01:57So, it kind of runs counter to this whole idea of, hey, it's only week four and you're 3-0,
02:03so let's long play this and keep you healthy.
02:08I actually don't know if this injury can be made worse.
02:10It just sounds like it's super painful.
02:12It probably could be made worse by another direct shot and other ribs being broken.
02:18I'm not sure if he has broken ribs.
02:20They haven't fully disclosed.
02:22I don't even think Kyle knew what side or what the actual injury was because he doesn't really traffic and
02:28that sort of thing and stuff.
02:29Are you able to play?
02:30Then you play.
02:31And for Mike Evans, you did this earlier with Ephraim Salam, our friend of the program, and all of his
02:37games played.
02:38And Mike Evans' career is full of 15s and 16s and 16s and 15s.
02:43There's a couple of 13s.
02:45Last year was eight, the first year that he didn't actually play into the teens in terms of number of
02:50games.
02:51And you look at Mike Evans, and he's now in year 13, and he just wants to play.
02:57It's what he likes to do.
02:58He said, it's my job.
03:00Okay, I love my job.
03:02And my job does not involve getting hit by other people and breaking ribs.
03:06But I want to do this job.
03:08I love my job.
03:09And he is somebody who wants to do it.
03:12He loves his job.
03:13And I do think he's got his eye on history.
03:15He won't say it, but he's going to maybe be the ninth player ever to have 1,000 catches and
03:22more than 100 receiving touchdowns.
03:25And he's 122 catches away.
03:27So when you play and you get catches, you move toward that very elite group.
03:32He says that he's done this before.
03:34He's played through this before.
03:37Mick Wagner did some digging to try to find the game where he was listed with a rib injury and
03:42played.
03:42And it came back in 2022 in November where the Buccaneers took on the Seattle Seahawks and defeated them.
03:53So thank you, Buccaneers.
03:54We appreciate that.
03:54But 21 to 16, and in the game, Mike had five catches for 54 yards and said, quote, it was
04:02brutal to play through.
04:05But it's something I can do.
04:08So he's done this before, and he's planning to do it again.
04:12Kyle Shanahan broke ribs in the car accident.
04:16So he was asked, he's like, so what that felt like, you know what I mean?
04:20What would you do, coach?
04:23Quote, I would be out without a doubt.
04:25And it's been two months.
04:27Correct.
04:28But he's definitely a lot tougher than me.
04:30So hopefully we've got a shot.
04:32End quote.
04:33Kyle Shanahan.
04:34Yeah, and I think that if it comes down to pain management, then, you know, Mike Evans' 13-year vet,
04:40and if you can actually go out there and not have it limit your range of motion,
04:45and that's what I saw two plays after he got hurt.
04:48Remember that he got that crunching hit?
04:50And then two plays later, Brock threw one of his bad passes of the day,
04:54and Evans couldn't even go up with two arms to challenge it.
04:57And that was his last snap of the game against Arizona.
05:00So as long as he's not limited in terms of, I don't know, being able to raise his arms
05:05or, like, range of motion to catch the football,
05:08then if it is just pain management, then go out there and play.
05:11I'm sure that it hurts like absolute hell.
05:16And Hofanga and the Denver Broncos defense knows all about it.
05:21So there's no doubt that they're going to try to hit him right there.
05:26Yeah.
05:26I'm trying to hit him right there.
05:28The old garment was the flak jacket, and I think that now it's kind of been evolved
05:33into what he's talking about, which is a compression shirt.
05:36Yeah.
05:36Well, he was actually asked about the flak jacket, and he said,
05:39no, I'm not planning to do that because, quote, it looks kind of weak.
05:44Said it's mostly for quarterbacks, but there is a padding option with the compression shirt
05:50that he plans to wear that you're bringing up and says that that's very, very important,
05:56that that's kind of built into it as he takes hits and probably even just the movement,
06:03the ball coming in or whatever is going to come into the midsection in a football game.
06:08Yeah, and I guess the compression shirt would be kind of like Spanx, which is what women
06:13occasionally wear to bring things all the way tight into the body so it doesn't look
06:19as loose and baggy, perhaps.
06:21And still, if you're wearing a compression shirt and you get hit in that area, the compression
06:26shirt's not going to protect you from a Hofanga to the ribs.
06:29No, it's going to hurt like hell.
06:30Right.
06:31I think it probably hurts like hell to do nothing.
06:34And he's going to play a football game or try.
06:38When a football player says it was brutal, but I can do it.
06:44If a football player says it's brutal, I don't even, my God, because what these guys do every
06:50week, it's just, it's unbelievable.
06:53I mean, Ephraim's description was great.
06:56It's like, I'd be at home and I couldn't grip a fork, but I'm playing football at one.
07:02He had two broken hands, your partner.
07:04Yep.
07:05So broken ribs, couldn't breathe.
07:07Yeah.
07:08You know what I mean?
07:09Seventh round pick.
07:10He's like, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not missing games.
07:13But this speaks to Mike Evans character, because as I mentioned, he is on track.
07:17If he plays this year and probably one more, he will join the elite group of thousand,
07:22one hundred receivers of which there are only eight.
07:27And if I named these people, you would know him by just one name, such people as Rice and
07:34Owens and Tony Gonzalez and the rest of it.
07:36And so Mike Evans doesn't have to do anything to get the gold jacket secured.
07:40He's got the jacket.
07:41He's going to be gold jacketed.
07:43But he wants to play because it's his job and this is what he loves doing.
07:48And that honestly, and I'm going back to Sunday and you and I had kind of had the same reaction
07:53from afar, which was like, oh my God, like he can't breathe.
07:56Like, can somebody, we need to do something for Mike.
07:59Like it was bad.
08:00Yeah.
08:01It looks really bad.
08:02It looks so bad.
08:02I can't believe that we're sitting here talking about him playing this week.
08:05Right.
08:06I didn't, you know, we got the good update on Monday that maybe things weren't that serious,
08:10but I still thought to myself, okay, great.
08:12Maybe he can play in Seattle.
08:14The, the, the idea that he's playing this weekend potentially is wild to me.
