Seahawks-49ers GameCenter: Live updates, highlights, how to watch, stream wild-card playoff game

The addition of a seventh playoff team in each conference starting in 2020 skews some of the historical stats. The Seahawks would already be done for the season if not for the added spot.

But, the rules are the rules, and the Seahawks will gladly take their 15^th playoff berth in 20 years — trailing only New England’s 17 in that same span — and hope to “do something with it,” as coach Pete Carroll said this week.

The Seahawks often have since Carroll arrived in 2010, winning at least one game in the playoffs in seven of their previous nine appearances.

Saturday’s game in Santa Clara against the 49ers will be as challenging as any with the Seahawks a 10-point underdog against a team that has won 10 in a row and swept them this year in two games by a combined score of 48-20, holding Seattle to just one offensive touchdown.

Let’s take a closer look at the matchup with the 49ers with our weekly keys to the game and prediction.

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The Seahawks made three moves Friday to bolster their roster for Saturday’s wild-card playoff game against the San Francisco 49ers, signing running back Tony Jones Jr. to the 53-man roster off the practice squad and elevating receiver Cade Johnson and linebacker Alexander Johnson from the practice squad.

Seattle waived defensive tackle Isaiah Mack off the 53-man roster to make room for Jones, who was added as depth with running back DeeJay Dallas listed as questionable with knee and quad injuries. 

Dallas was listed as limited in practice Thursday but coach Pete Carroll indicated he’d be able to play.

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Once upon a time, the Seahawks and 49ers had the NFL’s best rivalry, hands down. Certainly, it was the most heated — maybe in all of sports. The coaches had well-documented friction, the talented young quarterbacks were vying for supremacy, and the stakes were constantly at the highest level.

The intensity began to dissipate after the 2014 season when San Francisco coach Jim Harbaugh left for Michigan. It fizzled even more when the 49ers sank to the bottom of the NFC West Division for a four-year span, going 17-47 between 2015-18. By the time they got good again in ’19 under Kyle Shanahan — three coaches removed from Harbaugh — most of the players who made Seahawks vs. 49ers such riveting theater had retired or moved on (or moved from Seattle to San Francisco, in Richard Sherman’s case).

Could we be on the verge of a revived second chapter of this rivalry? Though it’s highly unlikely the Seahawks and 49ers will ever match the dynamic personalities (and personality conflicts) that flowed through both rosters in the heyday, or replicate the tension between the coaches, Saturday’s playoff game at Levi’s Stadium could well be the precursor to a new era of meaningful games between them.

And, after all, that’s how rivalries initially percolate — via two teams who constantly find the other one blocking their path toward a championship. Consider the current landscape of the division. The Rams mortgaged their future for last year’s Lombardi Trophy and now could be facing a prolonged dry spell. The Cardinals are in a state of disarray following a 4-13 season that resulted in the firing of their coach and resignation of their general manager.

The 49ers and Seahawks, meanwhile, have much brighter outlooks that portend many more significant encounters like Saturday’s. The heavily favored 49ers built a powerhouse and have emerged as one of the Super Bowl favorites. The Seahawks vastly overachieved expectations after trading quarterback Russell Wilson and now have a No. 5 overall draft pick coming, courtesy of the Broncos, to add a high-impact player.

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RENTON — If, as Janis Joplin so memorably sang, freedom is really just another word for having nothing left to lose, then consider the Seahawks to be, well, free as a bird as they head into the 2022 playoffs.

The Seahawks are as much as a 10-point underdog heading to Santa Clara to play a wild-card playoff game Saturday at 1:30 p.m. against the 49ers, who have won 10 in a row and feature a defense ranked first in the NFL in both fewest points and yards allowed and an offense ranked in the top six in both categories.

“It’s like nobody expects us to win outside of our building,” receiver Tyler Lockett said. “We believe that we can win, but nobody else does. Nobody thought that we would be able to do any of the things that we were able to do (this season). Everybody was shocked that we even got into the playoffs. I mean, for us it’s like, man, we’re just going to go out there and just play free. … We’re just going to play like we’ve got nothing to lose.”

As Lockett indicated, the season already feels like a success given the events of last March, when the Seahawks traded Russell Wilson and released Bobby Wagner, emphatically turning the page on the Legion of Boom era and heading uncertainly into a new one.

With a cachet of five draft picks over the 2022 and 2023 seasons from Denver, the season had all the feel of a rebuilding year, even if coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider always resisted using that word.

The joke was on much of the rest of the NFL — and the laughs in Seattle — as the Seahawks jumped out to a 6-3 start and rallied from a late-season slump to win the final two games and sneak into the seventh and final spot in the playoffs.

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RENTON — Seahawks quarterback Geno Smith had no real use for delving into fantasy this week.

As he prepared for the first postseason start of his career at the age of 32, against the 49ers on Saturday at Levi’s Stadium, Smith was asked if the game feels like a fitting end to what has been a “fairy tale” of a season.

“I would say it’s not a fairy tale,” Smith said. “I’d say it’s very much reality, and where we are as a team is that we’ve been working hard. We put a lot of good stuff on tape as a team. I think we’ve come a long way since the beginning of the season, since training camp and [organized team activities], and it’s all just a result of the hard work and all the repetition that everyone has put in.”

If returning to the playoffs after a year away was a team effort, it’s fair to say no one was more important than Smith, who throughout the ups and downs of a 17-game regular season provided the Seahawks with uncommon stability at the game’s most important position — and especially so in a season when there was uncommon instability at QB around the rest of the league.

When the dust cleared on the 2022 regular season, 68 different quarterbacks started games, the most in the NFL since 1987. That 1987 season comes with an asterisk as that was the year of a three-game players strike and replacement players, which resulted in 87 different QBs starting.

Smith was one of 10 quarterbacks this season to start all of his team’s games.

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RENTON — During a typical week, as the Seahawks are wrapping up their final walk-through practice the day before a game, Tyler Lockett will approach Sanjay Lal with an atypical request.

“Can we watch one more game together?” Lockett will ask.

Lal has spent 15 years as an NFL assistant coach. He’s worked with dozens and dozens of productive wide receivers. Few, if any, of them are as committed to their craft as he’s seen from Lockett this season.

Lal is happy to oblige Lockett’s request. Of course he is. And Lal knows he might learn as much from Lockett as Lockett learns from him when they squeeze in one last film study session the day before a game.

“He won’t go into a game without feeling completely comfortable,” said Lal, in his first season as the Seahawks passing-game coordinator and receivers coach. “He has to know how defensive backs play and how the structure of the defense is going to take him away, and he will know that better than any receiver I’ve been around.”

There shouldn’t be too many surprises Saturday when the Seahawks travel to the Bay Area for an NFC wild-card playoff game against the rival 49ers (1:30 p.m., FOX). Geno Smith and Seahawks receivers generally know how the 49ers secondary will defend them, just as the 49ers generally know how the Seahawks will want to attack them through the air.

That won’t stop the Seahawks from trying to come up with a few new wrinkles. And chances are, Lockett will have direct input in that.

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