Jake Tonges Camp Update — August 31: The Four-Game Branch Is Closed
2026 NFL Season · Monday, Aug 31
George Kittle was activated off the physically-unable-to-perform list on August twenty-third, closing the reserve-list scenario that would have guaranteed at least four Tonges-led games. What's left for Tonges is the margins — and Kittle still hasn't taken a team-drill rep.
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The switch that sizes Jake Tonges's season flipped, and it flipped against him — a week before the deadline it was supposed to wait for. George Kittle was activated off the active physically-unable-to-perform list on August 20-third and is on the active 53, per Will Simonds at NBC Sports Bay Area. No reserve list means no four-game minimum, which was the branch of this file where Tonges opened the season as the starter by rule. Adam Schefter of ESPN added Sunday that Kittle "hasn't had any setbacks," is expected to practice this week, and "still has a legitimate chance" at the Week One opener in Melbourne. If you caught the weekend's "setback" chatter, it was a misread of Kyle Shanahan's phrasing — "taken a step back" meant stepping back into the practice progression, per David Bonilla at 49ers Webzone — and the actual reporting runs the other direction.
What Kittle has not done is take a team-drill rep: individual drills only, on August 20-third and August 20-fifth, before the league-mandated three-day break closed the practice week, per Simonds. That gap is the whole remaining Tonges argument, and "legitimate chance" is Schefter's phrase for a chance, not a plan. Meanwhile the room thinned beneath him — tight ends Hayden Rucci and rookie Khalil Dinkins were both cut, Rucci per Matt Maiocco and Dinkins per Jeremy Fowler, in David Bonilla's tracker at 49ers Webzone, and Tonges appears on no cut, waiver, or injury list in it. In the finale, the club's recap records no Tonges receiving line; whether he played at all went unreported.
Last week's watch line asked two things: Kittle's roster designation — answered, and it's the whole episode — and whether Tonges would get a receiving line in the finale, which came back unreported. Back in June the preview sized his season as the difference between starter and backup belonging entirely to another man's tendon. Still true, but the stakes just repriced: the question is no longer four games or none, it's Week One or a few weeks, and the only evidence on his side of it is that the tendon still hasn't been asked to play team-speed football. More as the tight end picture develops.
_Data via nflverse._
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