The San Francisco 49ers visit Seattle to tackle the Seahawks in the National Football Conference’s Championship this coming Sunday, January 19 at Century Link Field. Kickoff is at 6:30pm ET, with the game being show nationally on the Fox Sports network.
The winner of the NFC Championship game will meet the winner of the AFC Championship game between the number one seeded Denver Broncos and the number two seed New England Patriots. The two winners will play Sunday, Feb 2nd in the National Football League’s Super Bowl XLVIII in New York, New York. It will also mark the very first ‘cold’ weather game to played outdoors in Super Bowl history.
Bookmakers see this game as a virtual toss-up, with the Hawks being made a 3-point favorite because of the home field advantage, while all expect the game to be very low scoring as the Total for this NFC Championship is set at 39.
On Sunday, the Niners and Hawks will be meeting as virtual mirror images of each other: both having very strong defences, strong running attacks (Niners’ Frank Gore and the Seahawks’ Marshawn Lynch) and young athletic quarterbacks (Niners Colin Kaepernick and the Hawks Russell Wilson). And both are led by their coaches who both were in the Pac 10 just four years ago.
The 49ers are led by Jim Harbaugh, while the Seahawks have Pete Carroll leading the way. Both teams flat out hate each other, as do both coaches, who’ve both had personal run-ins with each other over the years, in both the Pac 10 and in the NFL.
Head to head this year, the two teams split the two games, each winning in their home parks. The Seahawks thumped the Niners 27-3 back in week 2, while the Niners squeaked out a 19-17 win just four weeks ago, the gaming winning field goal booted with less than a minute remaining in the game.
Both teams are both going into the game quite healthy, with the biggest name in question being Seattle Wideout Percy Harvin, who is listed as questionable because of the NFL-mandated concussion protocol, as Harvin missed the second half of last week’s game against the New Orleans Saints with a concussion.
San Francisco, the number 5 seed in the NFC, has made it to the big NFC game by virtue of a 12-4 regular season record, and road playoff wins over both Green Bay and Carolina. Seattle had a 13-3 regular season mark, giving it the number 1 seed in the NFC. Last week the Hawks squeezed by the visiting New Orleans Saints by a 23-15 count.