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Learn more at vertexinck.com. This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Join me today.

That's my good friend Nate Tyson.

How you doing, buddy?

I'm doing very well. I'm feeling super for. Join me today. That's my good friend Nate Tyson. How you doing, buddy? I'm doing very well.

I'm feeling super for the super wildcard weekend. Is that a new thing? Is that this year that they started calling that super? It was a super wildcard weekend last year. I don't remember if they called it that last year. Okay. I totally forgot there was a Monday game. I did too. This happens to me every single year.

So I just revert back to whatever my old schedule thoughts were. Right. It's like, oh, this is this time. This is how this works. So last year we did a Saturday and a Sunday while Kirk preview. So I figured out we'll do Saturday and Sunday again. And then our producers like, well, you know, there's a Monday game. Like, how do you want to split those up? I was like, God, damn it. I don't remember how we did it last year. So we're doing NFC and AFC. Boom. Wild card preview today. This is the NFC show, the AFC show. It's already available in your guys' podcast feed. The wonders of time travel.. As soon as you're done with this, you can go listen to that. Love doing these shows. Love just really digging down into each individual playoff matchup. That's exactly what we're going to do today. Talk about kind of how we got here with each of these teams. A couple aspects on each side of the ball that we're interested in, try to

keep things on the rails as much as we possibly can. And we're going to talk about each individual matchup in the NFC. And then when you're done, please go listen to the AFC. So let's start. We're going in chronological order here. Seahawks at the 49ers, Saturday at 4.30 p.m. I don't know about you,

but when I went back

and rewatched this game,

we talked about this on a recap show, pretty much all rematches that were getting in the wildcard round, some more relevant than others based on when they happened. And the Niners Seahawks rematch was in week 15. It was only about a month ago, so a lot of those ideas and a lot of

the things that happened in that game can translate to this one. When I was watching the Niners,

I just couldn't get over how incredible they look on both sides of the ball. The skill position

talent, Depot didn't even play. And the guys that they have on that side, the first McCaffrey run

that he had, it looks like he gets shot out of a cannon. You go when you watch them play on defense and the defensive line just takes over by the end of the game and Bose is a monster and Warner was a racing an area of the field. Javerius Ward had a great game, which we're going to talk about. And that's how they felt over the second half of the season. Obviously, they've had some speed bumps. They didn't play great against the Raiders and stuff like that. But they have just been overwhelming. That is the adjective that I would use about them over the second half of the year. And I felt like that week 15 game was such a stark reminder of

that. Yeah, both sides of the ball. Like you said, the defense of course is, I mean, just an absolutely fantastic unit, no matter how you want to try to attack them passing or running the ball. The way, we talk about their D-line, always playing with their hair on fire, but just every position, linebackers, D-Bs, they all play the same way, all the same mindset. And then on offense, it's just they could literally take any touch to the house. They have that type of juice on offense. And like you said, like when you get away, you kind of, I, like doing this show, sometimes we watch the same team, maybe three weeks in a row. And then you kind of take a breather sometimes where it's like, okay, we're talking about other teams and just the flow of the season, even just a couple weeks of not watching the 49ers on film at all 22. And then watching other defenses. Like I watched the Jacks Titans game, watching Giants Vikings, watching just some other games throughout the last couple

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