HENDERSON, Nev. – Seven minutes before George Kittle’s 6:10 a.m. alarm was set to go off, he and the rest of his San Francisco 49ers teammates were jarred awake by something else: the fire alarm at the team’s hotel on the outskirts of Las Vegas.
Kittle jumped out of bed, walked into his bathroom, closed the door and waited there for the next 18 minutes until the noise stopped. Nobody was forced to evacuate as engineers at the hotel said it was a false alarm.
But not every Niner was quite as nonplussed by the disturbance as Kittle. When he walked down to breakfast, he took an informal poll among his teammates to see who was the grumpiest because of the early wake up call.
The answer: a tie between running back Christian McCaffrey and defensive end Nick Bosa , both of whom are notorious in San Francisco’s locker room for their devotion to routine.
“It had to be them,” Kittle said. “You don’t want to wake the sleeping bear. But Christian was not happy, too.”
Indeed, McCaffrey and Bosa were both still at least slightly agitated about it later on Thursday afternoon when they met with the media for the final time before Sunday’s Super Bowl LVIII against the Kansas City Chiefs .