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Will the 49ers be the No. 1 Seed in the NFC Next Season?

They're one of the oldest teams in the NFL. Their season went longer than any other NFC team's season did this past year. And they've played 60 games since 2021.
Grant Cohn|
Will the 49ers be the No. 1 Seed in the NFC Next Season?
Will the 49ers be the No. 1 Seed in the NFC Next Season?

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San Francisco 49ers

Each time the 49ers have gone to the Super Bowl under Kyle Shanahan, they were the No. 1 seed in the NFC playoffs. Which means they had a first-round bye week and homefield advantage throughout the playoffs.

Will the 49ers be the No. 1 seed next season?

Probably not.

They're one of the oldest teams in the NFL. Their season went longer than any other NFC team's season did this past year. And they've played 60 games since 2021. Plus their schedule will be brutal next season. They'll face the Chiefs, the Bills, the Dolphins, the Lions, the Packers and the Cowboys, not to mention the Rams twice.

Don't get me wrong -- the 49ers still should be a very good team next season. But I highly doubt they'll get a first-round bye in the playoffs. Not when a team like the Lions are younger and have an easier schedule. And they might not even with the NFC West.

2023 was the 49ers' year. They did everything right. They let the bitter defeat in the NFC Championship Game fuel them all year. They worked hard in the offseason. They stayed relatively healthy. They had a 10-point lead in the Super Bowl. They won the coin toss in overtime. And they still lost.

Will everything go the 49ers way next season, too?

Last time the 49ers lost the Super Bowl, they fell apart the following season. Had an incredible amount of injuries, finished the season with six wins and missed the playoffs. It took them a full year to recover from the agony of losing the Super Bowl.

How long will it take the 49ers to recover this time?

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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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