Over the last four days, the San Francisco 49ers have kept their offseason workouts under wraps, with no media access to provide us with random tidbits of knowledge about random player X. The 49ers held a rookie minicamp over the weekend and have had continued workouts yesterday and today, but we haven't been able to figure much out from those workouts.
Never fear, help is on the way! The 49ers have created a media pool of daily practice video from select on-field workouts during Phase 2 of the offseason workouts. Under NFL rules, the media is only allowed to post 90 seconds of video per day. Below you will find 88 seconds of video from yesterday's workout courtesy of 49ers.com and NFL.com. While it is fairly limited, and tells us almost nothing about player progress in the offseason, it still does something to get us through this wildly dead time in the NFL calendar.
I had to cut out about 30 seconds of content, but I got rid of some random exercises that really were not all that exciting. This video opens with Alex Smith firing a pass to A.J. Jenkins. Feel free to break down Smith's mechanics based on two seconds of video. It's all the rage!
Next we move on to a wide receiver drill where the receivers are thrown a pass just behind them and they have to adjust to make the catch. Rookie Brian Tyms (#9) had the best catch of the group as he had to go way back to grab the pass with one hand.
The video then moves on to pulling drills involving two guards and a center. We see two sets of players engaging in the drill. The first group has rookie Jason Slowey playing the left guard position while Garrett Chisholm is at center and Derek Hall is the pulling right guard. Slowey has been considered by some to be an eventual center option, but for now he is sticking with guard. Well, for the purposes of this one drill.
The second group had Daniel Kilgore at center, Mike Iupati at left guard and Alex Boone as the pulling right guard. The drill involves the right guard pulling to the left, going around a trash can and then picking up a softball. Exciting stuff.
The next segment is Colin Kaepernick firing a pass to A.J. Jenkins. We see Kaepernick drop back, but then the camera pans to Jenkins making his cut in and catching the pass. It seemed like a sharp enough cut, but who really knows given the amount of time we see in it.
We get to see some rookies closing out the video. The first is safety Trenton Robinson backpedaling a couple steps, then turning and running and catching a pass fired from behind a blocking dummy looking sort of thing.
The second and third are Joe Holland and Cam Johnson running a drill. They are sliding back and forth while moving forward and around some padding. The drill concludes with a coach tossing them a football to catch and run forward.
All in all, we don't learn much from the video, but it is a modest satisfaction of our need for something resembling football action. I don't know whether it's worse that I watched the video a good four or five times, or whether I enjoyed it each time.