NFC Championship Game, Seahawks vs. 49ers final score: Seattle advances to Super Bowl with 23-17 win
By Josh Hill
All week long, we couldn’t hear enough about Brady vs. Manning and while that was a historic matchup of quarterbacking titans, the MTV version of that quarterback matchup was up in Seattle between Colin Kaepernick and Russell Wilson.
The seasoned veteran quarterbacks kicked the day off where as the young guns in the league capped off the night with an absolute instant classic in the NFC Championship game. Things started out slow, as we expected them too, but the game never got one-sided despite mistakes on both ends that could have blown the game open for their opponent.
The first mistake of the game came at the expense of Russell Wilson and the Seahawks, as after a week of predicting how many mistakes the Niners would make, the first play of the game resulted in a Seattle fumble.
San Francisco controlled their first half, taking a 10-3 lead into halftime, but the real football game broke out after the half. Straight out of the gate, Marshawn Lynch went Beast Mode 2.0 and tied the game at 10-10 with a momentum stealing touchdown run reminiscent of this run against the Saints a few years ago.
That run got the crowd into things and electrified a Seahawks defense that had let the Niners bully it in the first half. The mistakes started to pile up for San Francisco as well, with Kaepernick throwing a critical late game interception that halted the Niners momentum.
But before that, both teams traded touchdowns in a very uncharacteristic way as neither of these defenses tend to get in those situations. However, after Russell Wilson threw a beautiful touchdown pass to give the Seahawks a 20-17 lead, they held onto the momentum for the rest of the game.
One of the scarier moments of the game came when the Niners stuffed the Seahawks on a goal line play, but linebacker NaVorro Bowman’s knee got trapped and bent in a way no human knee is designed to bend. After he was carted off the field, the Niners got the ball back but killed their own momentum with a Kaepernick interception.
Despite that, the Niners defense held firm and managed to only give up three points on consecutive drives that saw the Seahawks operate deep inside of San Francisco territory. Colin Kaepernick almost led his team to a miracle finish as well, but Richard Sherman ended things with an exclamation point.
The game was a true classic, as it went right down to the wire. The Super Bowl is now set and we can only hope that the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks meeting each other in New Jersey will be as entertaining as the NFC Championship was on Sunday.