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Which Team Should the 49ers Want to Win the AFC Championship Game?

The knee-jerk response might be the Chiefs simply because they have Patrick Mahomes, who might be the greatest quarterback of all time.
Grant Cohn|
Which Team Should the 49ers Want to Win the AFC Championship Game?
Which Team Should the 49ers Want to Win the AFC Championship Game?

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San Francisco 49ers

Let's get way ahead of ourselves.

The 49ers haven't even played the NFC Championship Game, and there's absolutely no guarantee they'll make it to the Super Bowl. But come on -- they SHOULD beat the Lions. We all know that. 

So assuming the 49ers take care of business and don't beat themselves this weekend, assuming they make it back to the Super Bowl for the first time since 2020, who should they want to face, the Ravens or the Chiefs?

The knee-jerk response might be the Chiefs simply because they have Patrick Mahomes, who might be the greatest quarterback of all time. He never has lost to the 49ers, and he beat them in the Super Bowl, as you know.

But the Chiefs aren't as good as they were four seasons ago. Their left tackle, Donovan Smith, is not good. They led the league in dropped passes with 44. And they have a good running back in Isaiah Pacheco, but Andy Reid doesn't call nearly enough runs for him.

So despite how great Mahomes is, the Ravens are better everywhere else. They have a better offensive line than the Chiefs, better offensive weapons than the Chiefs (assuming tight end Mark Andrews plays) and a better defense than the Chiefs. And while the Chiefs have the best quarterback in the NFL, the Ravens have the second-best quarterback in the NFL.

Plus the Ravens faced the 49ers already this season, and beat them by 14 points on their home field.

So the answer is clear. If the 49ers beat the Lions this Sunday, they should hope to face the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, not the Ravens.

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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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