Using your legs in football is just as important as passing it. Sadly, the San Francisco 49ers are short of players who can use their legs to get the W’s. First, it was Christian McCaffrey with his Achilles injuries, and now it’s their kicker Jake Moody, who is dealing with an ankle injury. The sprain occurred during the Niners’s 23-24 loss to the Arizona Cardinals.

For some reason, teams don’t give enough thought to having a backup kicker. Given how important their job is, it’s surprising that the 49ers don’t have someone to replace Jake Moody. Mike Florio has a few things to say about their supposed mismanagement and asked Kyle Shanahan to adopt Andy Reid’s approach.

“It’s amazing to me how every team doesn’t have another guy on the roster who they know can kick or they find a guy who might have a shade of ability and they spend the time developing him just in case because even though there’s a small chance you’re going to lose that guy if you do, you better have somebody else who can do it. Like a Justin Reid,” Florio said on NFL on NBC.

Going off of Mike Florio’s narrative, the Kansas City Chiefs decided to insert the Safety Justin Reid as their new kickoff man, and they have also used him in the past when Harrison Butker was injured. This also injects a sense of surprise, and the opposing teams are generally not expecting a Safety to play a kicker. The Chiefs special team’s coordinator knows a thing or two about it.

“Justin can cover, he can kick, and he can go down there and make tackles,” Chiefs special teams coordinator Dave Toub said, per CBS. “He’s an extra guy they’re probably not accounting for. … A guy like Justin is a guy they have to worry about. They have to get him blocked, and they have to give up blocking someone else.”

Coming back to the San Francisco 49ers, Jake Moody wasn’t seen on the field after the first half. The 49ers played the final 35 minutes of the game without a kicker. How did he get injured in the first place? Well, he was trying to tackle a kick return but suffered a high right ankle sprain instead after being hit. The 49ers blew a double-digit lead on Moody’s absence, and this has happened for the second time this season.

So, what do the 49ers think about all this?

The Niners players don’t have time to think about the loss

Jake Moody was frustrated and was throwing his helmet around after “he got under the ball a bit,” and Cards returner DeeJay Dallas caught the ball and crossed the Niners’s first line of defenders. He bumped into Moody, who was knocked backward and rolled over his kicking leg. Of course, this is a huge loss for the 49ers, and the team recognizes it.

George Kittle expressed his discontent when he said that Moody is a “hell” of a kicker and that losing Moody is not an “option” for the team. However, despite the loss, Jake Moody thinks he got away with a sprain when the injury could have been much worse. However, he was in immediate pain after he was knocked backward.

“Thankfully I didn’t feel anything break or crack or anything as I did when I did break it,” Moody said. “That was good. But I knew something was wrong immediately. It’s just unfortunate.” At this point, the San Francisco 49ers don’t have the time to look back into the past and regret the losses they have faced.

Kyle Shanahan said he’d “love” to complain about his circumstances, but there’s not any time for that. After the loss against the Cardinals, the Niners are 2-3. But the 49ers HC thinks that they can turn the team around in the game against the Seattle Seahawks on Thursday. Whether these absences will still affect the 49ers remains to be seen.