Let’s start with this: The 49ers have won a total of five road playoff games in their franchise history, and only four since they began winning Super Bowls in the 1980s.
The first win came at Minnesota in 1970, a 17-14 divisional-round triumph behind quarterback John Brodie. The second victory came in a wind-chill factor of minus-26 degrees, when Joe Montana led a 28-3 whipping of Chicago in the January 1989 NFC title game. The final three road wins came in January 2013 and January 2014, when Colin Kaepernick and the 49ers prevailed in Atlanta, Green Bay and Carolina.
As a warning to the 2019 49ers and their fans: You can count these successes on one hand.
Steve Young never won a road playoff game in three tries. Montana also lost his first three, making Kaepernick the only 49ers’ starting QB with a winning postseason record (3-1) on the road. And even he didn’t come through in the one that seemed to matter most, the January 2014 NFC Championship game at Seattle.
So as the 49ers (10-2) enter the home stretch of this regular season, that’s context worth hammering home. These four games against the Saints (10-2), Falcons (3-9), Rams (7-5) and Seahawks (10-2) will determine if the 49ers’ playoff road consists of a bye and up to two home contests or no bye and up to three road games.
The 49ers — no matter how deep and efficient they may be or how capable they looked on Sunday in going toe-to-toe with Baltimore before losing on the road — simply cannot count on successfully conquering the latter path.
Only nine wild-card teams have made it to the Super Bowl since the playoff format was expanded to 10 teams in 1978 (it expanded to 12 teams in 1990). There’ve been 160 wild-card teams since that 1978 season, so the hard road has seen a success rate of only 5.6 percent.
But there’s an alternative that’s far more appealing than the wild card and it’s still available to the 49ers: 53 percent of No. 1 seeds — who are guaranteed home-field advantage throughout the playoffs — have made the Super Bowl since 1990.
Both ends of the spectrum are still on the table. Winning out will earn the 49ers the cushy No. 1 seed, while losing just once can relegate them to a wild-card spot and the brutal road of the No. 5 seed.
Other factors complicate this, of course. (Seattle and New Orleans can still lose other games to give the 49ers breathing room.)
And the tie-breaking scenarios will apply at the end of the season are still too murky to fully discuss right now.But the razor-thin margin for error has been set.
It’s fitting that the 49ers travel to face the Saints for the first game of the pressure cooker.
Remember 2013, the 49ers’ most recent playoff season. They lost a November game to New Orleans (
this Ahmad Brooks-on-Drew Brees personal foul penalty may ring a bell). The defeat ultimately pushed the 49ers down to 12-4, behind the 13-3 Seahawks in the NFC West.
As a result, the 49ers became the No. 5 seed, tasked with beating the No. 4 Packers (8-7-1) and No. 2 Panthers (12-4) in those road playoff games. Kaepernick pushed them through, but the 49ers finally ran out of gas in the NFC Championship Game at No. 1 Seattle — a title game that would’ve been played at Candlestick Park instead of CenturyLink Field had the 49ers beaten New Orleans (the 49ers held the divisional-record tiebreaker over the Seahawks in 2013).
As the 49ers prepare for this game, the stakes are similar. A 14-2 finish would guarantee them the No. 1 seed, but there’s a real chance that the 49ers finish as a 13-3 wild card. And the schedule poses a final landmine that makes the situation potentially even more difficult than 2013.
The 49ers and Seattle square off at CenturyLink in Week 17.
If that game does indeed determine the NFC West title, it’ll surely be an exhausting fight, similar to many 49ers-Seahawks battles of this decade. The losing team will have to carry its bruises directly into a road wild-card game, with more travel and playoff football still potentially waiting beyond that.
In that scenario, the 49ers would possibly have to play not just three, but
fourstraight weeks of playoff-stakes football on the road to reach the Super Bowl.
That’d be a gauntlet that no team should be counted on to overcome. So even though these aren’t technically elimination games, perhaps the 49ers should approach them as such. Their fate may well be dictated in December, even if they do move into January.
with Deion about his head bands.
