NFC Championship Game Preview

The Giants and the 49ers have such a storied history together, and it makes for an incredible rivalry. The first season that I ever really started following football, way back in 1981, they met during the regular season, and again, they met during the playoffs. The Giants had just beaten the defending NFC champions, the Eagles, in Philadelphia. They had gone eighteen years without qualifying for the post season once, but their fortunes had changed, and they were building up towards something special. The win in Philly qualified them to meet the 49ers, who also had been a losing team for some time, but had turned it around under wizard coach Bill Walsh, and cool, calm, collected young quarterback Joe Montana.

The 49ers won that meeting, 38-24. The next week, they would go on to defeat the Dallas Cowboys, largely because of one of the most famous plays in NFL history, "The Catch", when Dwight Clark reached up high to catch a high ball from Joe Montana that he had seemed to be throwing away under pressure from Dallas defenders. It earned San Fransisco it's first ever Super Bowl appearance, which it also won.

The Giants fortunes sank for the next couple of years, but they returned the the playoffs in 1984, again winning a playoff game on the road, this time against the Los Angeles Rams. Once again, also, this qualified them for a divisional round playoff meeting against (who else?) the San Fransisco 49ers. The defense fought harder this time, but the 15-1 49ers proved just a bit too much still, and defeated the Giants, 21-10, en route to their second Super Bowl victory.

Bill Parcells had become the Giants coach by then, and he worked hard to make sure the Giants improved and were disciplined and ready. The next season, the Giants stepped it up, and became a team that many people watched, with predictions of great things to come. They finished with a 10-6 record, and hosted their first playoff game in decades, hosting the defending Super Bowl champion San Fransisco 49ers, and dominated them, 17-3. They went to the divisional round once again, but there, they met the most dominant team that I have ever seen, the 1985 Chicago Bears, who dismantled the New York Giants, 21-0. The Giants lost that game, and in fact were blanked, but many people cite that game as the first real signs that the Giants were building themselves up towards greater accomplishments for the future.

The future for the Giants was 1986, and Parcells made sure the Giants took the right steps forward. They lost the season opener, and lost midway through the season against the Seahawks, and then never lost again, winning the rest of the way. One of those victories came on a Monday Night in San Fransisco, where Phil Simms hit Mark Bavaro in the 2^nd half, who then broke numerous tackles and dragged several defenders to gain a first down, and was the shot the Giants needed to rejuvenate them and come back from far behind to win, 21-17, ultimately. The Giants pulled off nine straight victories to end the season with a 14-2 record, earning them home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Their first meeting was, of course, against the NFC West champion 49ers, once again. It was the third meeting in a row in the playoffs between the two teams, and the most famous play happened early in the game, when a wide open Jerry Rice inexplicably dropped a pass prior to running in the end zone, something the 49ers never recovered from. The Giants took over the game. They bullied and bruised San Fransisco, knocking Montana out of the game, scoring on defense and offense, and obliterating their opponents, 49-3. They would go on to win the NFC Championship, and then their first ever Super Bowl.

The Giants then struggled for a couple of seasons, but returned to strong form in 1989, which was supposed to be a rebuilding season for them, following two consecutive seasons missing the playoffs. Instead, they went 12-4, winning their division and earning the second seed, although they lost their first game. In the meantime, San Fransisco had gone on to have a spectacular season in 1988, with one of the keys being a come from behind fourth quarter comeback victory at Giants Stadium, 20-17, early in the season, perhaps setting the tone for both teams. The meeting in 1989 went for the 49ers as well, although the Giants had proven a tough test. Still, the 49ers won the Super Bowl again following the 1989 season, becoming the first team in a decade to win back to back Super Bowls, their fourth in a decade, and enough to earn them "Team of the Decade" honors, and marking them as one of the greatest teams of all time.

From that point onwards, the 49ers were on a mission to start off the new decade on the right foot, and win a third straight Super Bowl, something that no team had, or has, managed to achieve. The Giants also were ready to make a strong run and, indeed, both teams started off red hot. They were set to meet in the early December, what would have been the 12^th game for each team, and they both had started off with undefeated, 10-0 starts. Almost everyone anticipated the "Clash of the Titans" would be between two undefeated teams, but they both rather inexplicably lost their next games prior to meeting. Still, a meeting of 10-1 teams was pretty good, and it became the second most watched Monday Night Football game of all time, up to that time. The 49ers won, 7-3, in the lowest scoring affair of the season. The 49ers had the inside track on home field advantage, while the Giants were struggling. A couple of weeks later, the y would lose again, this time to the seemingly red-hot Buffalo Bills, and lose starting quarterback Phil Simms for the season in the process. It seemed that the Giants promising season had come crashing and burning down.

Yet, they hung on to the 2^nd seed in the NFC, at least, where they met the Chicago Bears. Some thought the Bears a better team, and that they would defeat the Giants. But Jeff Hostetler, stepping up for the injured Phil Simms, added some new dimensions to the offense, and his mobility was a threat that Chicago was not prepared for. The Giants, with two weeks off, had an incredible game plan, and destroyed the Chicago Bears, 31-3, a bit of revenge for the 1985 drubbing. That victory earned them another Championship Game appearance against a very familiar opponent by now, the San Fransisco 49ers.

That was an epic game, and still ranks among my favorite football games of all time. The 49ers played like the champions that they were, and held the Giants without a touchdown. Yet, it was a mark of how strong the Giants defense was that they managed to stay in the game from beginning to end, holding the 49ers to a mere 13 points, meaning that in their two combined meetings, the 49ers had scored a total of 20 points, which was less than they scored in their average game that season! The Giants had allowed the sole touchdown in the 3^rd quarter, falling behind 13-6, but they chipped away at the lead with field goals, closing to within a point late in the 4^th quarter. Once again, the Giants had knocked QB Joe Montana out of a playoff game, when Leonard Marshall caught up to him and hit him from behind, just before he released the ball, a vicious, but clean, hit.. Neither team had given up the ball, until Eric Howard hit 49ers back Roger Craig and knocked the ball loose, which Lawrence Taylor managed to recover. The Giants offense now went back to work, working their way down the field while simultaneously killing the clock. With 4 seconds left, the Giants sent in Matt Bahr, who split the uprights to give the Giants a 15-13 victory that earned them the right to their second Super Bowl appearance, this time against the same Buffalo Bills that had defeated them about one month earlier. The Giants pulled off the victory with a razor thin margin, 20-19.

The two teams would meet on the first Monday Night Football game of the 1991 season, and it was very similar to the NFC Championship game, just seven or so months earlier. Low-scoring, hard-hitting, and with the Giants pulling off a last second victory off the foot of Matt Bahr. It seemed like a great start, but in fact, both teams would struggle and eventually miss the playoffs.

They met in the playoffs one more time in the nineties, following the 1993 season, and San Fransisco destroyed the Giants then, 44-3, exacting revenge from the 1986 playoff meeting.

The two teams would meet again in the playoffs following the 2002 season, and the Giants looked like the stronger of the two teams for much of it, jumping out to a 38-14 lead. But the 49ers mounted an incredible comeback, the second biggest comeback in NFL Playoff history, and went on to win, 39-38. The Giants still had a chance to win it on the last play of the game with a field goal, but the snap went wrong, and the Giants never got it off properly, thus preserving the 49ers win.

The San Fransisco 49ers were the "Team of the Decade" in the 1980's, and were the winningest team in terms of percentage of any decade in the 90's, a record that the Indianapolis Colts managed to break the following decade. San Fransisco won the Super Bowl again following the1994 season. Yet, no team had greater meaningful success against them during their true glory years than the Giants, who knocked them out of the playoffs three times overall, twice when the 49ers boasted the title of defending champions, and got some key victories against them during the regular season, as well.

This is, of course, a different era, and these two teams are different than those teams of the past. The 49ers are more conservative, and seem almost to be more similar to those Giants teams of old. After years of futility, they put it all together this season, and look as good as they have in a long time. The Giants, in the meantime, managed to win the Super Bowl in 2007, and have shown some strong form towards the end of this season, winning the last two games of the season to earn the division title, then dominating the Falcons at home, and 15-1 Green Bay at Lambeau, in order to qualify for this Championship Game.

The two teams have met in seven postseasons, with the 49ers holding the slight edge in the series, 4-3. However, in my lifetime, the Giants are undefeated at 4-0 in Championship Game appearances, and I think they will stretch that impressive undefeated mark to 5-0 this time around.

I'm going to go ahead and predict a Giants victory.