SANTA CLARA – The 49ers’ first round pick, A.J. Jenkins, did not catch a pass in the regular season. He was not a contributor. This afternoon, Jim Harbaugh was asked if Jenkins can contribute in the playoffs. Here’s what Harbaugh said.
Q: Where is A.J. Jenkins in his development? Can he contribute in the playoffs?
HARBAUGH: Do I think he can? Yes. Do we need him to? Yes. We need him to step up. Definitely think he’s capable of doing it.
Q: Crabtree has dominated a lot of the targets. Do you need someone else to step up alongside him and take the pressure off?
HARBAUGH: I think we have that. I think we have guys – Randy Moss, Delanie Walker, Vernon Davis, Frank Gore.
Now, A.J. Jenkins? Capable? Yes. Step up? Yes. Definitely think he can do that.
LaMichael – same situation. He’s been doing a nice job in that department.
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I guess AJ Jenkins remains a ‘wait-n-see.’ Harbaugh would never say he wasn’t capable of filling in, because if thats what he thought, AJ wouldn’t be on the team. Hopefully he’s gotten more reps in practice recently because of the injuries, and hopefully he turns out to be a legitimate NFL WR. But we haven’t gotten any clues since the preseason/TC about whether or not that is likely.
I think i’m going to continue to reserve judgement on AJ for now. People were starting to turn on lamichael james simply because he was buried on the depth chart. He has already proven to be more useful than AJ even though both position groups have injuries. The sample size of 1 pass thrown his way is a little bit too small to make much hay, LMJ has gotten way more opportunities.
It seems like they should at least be able to use AJJ on some clear out routes. Maybe take a deep shot to him early, and regardless of success, the D would have to react going forward. Can he catch the slant out of the slot? The Jerk? Try again on that drag?
Regarding LMJ, I’ll disagree with Grant’s earlier assessments; I think he’s shown improvement running inside.
Shortly after he was drafted I saw youtube highlights of Jenkins scoring on shallow drag routes. He excels at deep outs too (and Kaep has the gun to get it there). Just keep feeding him the ball.
Just throw him the ball. Once is not enough! Pretty soon fans are going to be saying the same thing they said about LMJ – Why wasn’t he on the field sooner?
+1
I’ve seen him make some nice catches in the preseason, but the playoffs are a tough place to catch your first NFL pass. I’m concerned he may take his eye off the ball and allow an interception.