Kurtenbach: Kyle Shanahan once compared him to a 9-year-old. Now Kendrick Bourne is carrying the Niners

SANTA CLARA — When the 49ers signed Kendrick Bourne back in Week 2, it wasn’t some grand personnel coup from John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan.

No, it was an act of pure, unadulterated desperation. They needed bodies. Any bodies. Warm bodies. Preferably bodies that knew how to catch a football.

Bourne, a former Niner fresh off getting dumped by the New England Patriots at the end of training camp, was hanging around, and he seemed as good an option as any. The Niners took what they could get.

Six weeks later, it turns out the Niners got a whole lot more than they bargained for, in just about every way imaginable.

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To the delight of equally desperate fantasy football players, Bourne has racked up 142 receiving yards in both of the Niners’ last two games, establishing himself as the offensive engine for a team that somehow pulled off a shocker in Los Angeles in Week 5. Even his earlier performances were solid enough for a guy asked to jump onto what Mike Tomlin calls “the moving train.”

And then there’s the flip side of the box-score success. The pre-snap penalties. The “Wait, what play are we running?” moments. The drops. And the blocking — my goodness, the blocking. Let’s just say it’s not optimal.

At the final horn of every 49ers game, I partake in the Faustian bargain that is a “Studs and Scrubs” column. I’ve considered creating a new category: Studs, Scrubs, and Kendrick Bourne. He’s the whole spectrum in one.

To be clear: The good outweighs the bad. And beggars can’t be choosers.

Seriously, where would this team be without Kendrick Bourne? (What a sentence.)

But it all amalgamates into a wide receiver who demands to be reckoned with on a nearly snap-by-snap basis for all the right and wrong reasons. It’s a case study in San Francisco’s bizarre but winning 2025 offense.

It’s all rather exhausting, no?

Apparently not if you’re on the inside. Bourne is one of those big, vivacious personalities that teammates just rave about. You can’t help but love the guy. Even Kyle Shanahan, a man who seems to believe wide receiver blocking is a direct window into a man’s soul, can’t help but smirk when he talks about Bourne.

“Bourne’s a funny guy. He reminds me a lot of my son, who’s nine,” Shanahan said in 2019, during Bourne’s first tour of duty. “I don’t mean that as an insult… Kind of.”

Both Shanahan and teammates say that the comparison is no longer applicable. A nine-year-old can’t hang around the league for long.

Fast forward to 2025, and you have a player who knows what it takes. The failures in the details aren’t seen as a lack of focus, but the predictable chaos of joining mid-season.

“I mean, for someone just to hop in here Week 2 and get thrown into a starting role by Week 4, I’ve been very appreciative that we’ve been able to have Bourne here,” Shanahan told me Wednesday. “He’s helped us out a lot. By no means is it perfect, like anybody, but he’s getting better each week at catching up with the offense and stuff like that. I feel we’ve been fortunate to have him.”

And to Bourne’s credit, he seems to get it.

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“Everybody [wants to] look at the 142,” Bourne joked with the media after I asked him about his blocking. “There’s bigger stuff than that.”

It wasn’t just lip service to some dork asking why his blocking might be a component (but hardly the sole reason) of the worst run game in the NFL.

“I want to block better. There’s plays to be made. There’s more stuff out there that I can do better to spring [Christian McCaffrey] and things like that,” Bourne said. “I definitely didn’t block as much in New England as I do here, it’s a better system with the run game; it’s a different system. So I got to apply different styles, different angles towards the safeties and things like that. So working on that… growing within the scheme again, and it’s been a fun challenge for me and I’m going to take it on.”

Talk is cheap. Doing it is another story. The Niners seem confident this edition of Bourne will follow through. Quarterback Mac Jones, who has an obvious connection with Bourne from their time in New England, saw the change up close.

“I came in as a rookie and we were in OTAs or whatever… we were throwing on some practice field and K.B. just comes out and he’s got his chains on and he’s just smiling and laughing. I’m like, this guy is pretty crazy,” Jones said Thursday. “But he is just a great guy and worked really hard. He’s just gone through such a reformation, through his journey with Christ and everything [the NFL brings] too. I really lean on him as a good friend of mine and really love the guy. He’s one of my best friends. So really just happy we got to reconnect here, and we want to keep going.”

So where does this all go? Well, Bourne is going to be the No. 1 target for the foreseeable future, mostly because everyone else is falling apart. Ricky Pearsall’s “day-to-day” knee injury resulted in him not practicing for weeks. (Remember, his is the same injury that brought McCaffrey’s season in 2024.) Brandon Aiyuk’s return isn’t imminent, nor is it guaranteed to be fruitful. Jauan Jennings is held together with duct tape, claiming five broken ribs and two sprained ankles — he’s only playing because he’s in a contract year, but he’s a shell of himself.

And yet, somehow, the Niners are 4-2, perfect in the NFC West, and still the oddsmakers’ favorites to win the division.

This wasn’t the plan. Nobody drew this up. But Bourne as the top guy… is working. And it has room to grow. Even with George Kittle returning this week and maybe Brock Purdy next, Bourne is going to be the focal point of an offense that has to score 30-plus just to stay afloat. The Niners are counting on him. They _believe_ in him.

This could all blow up spectacularly if the messy parts of his game don’t get cleaned up. Or, it could be the boon that turns this into a season to remember — one of the greatest off-the-street signings in Niners history.

The fate of the 2025 49ers season rests, in many ways, on the physically narrow shoulders of Kendrick Bourne — agent of chaos.

Buckle up.