Gotta beat the Chiefs: Jerry Rice puts pressure on 49ers to win looming Super Bowl rematch

Speaking on behalf of the FedEx Air & Ground Awards is Pro Football Hall of Famer, Jerry Rice. NFL fans can vote weekly for the FedEx Air & Ground NFL Players of the Week Awards on X via the NFL published polls at @NFL, on NFL.com, and on the NFL Mobile App all season long.

The San Francisco 49ers will host the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday afternoon in a much-anticipated Super Bowl rematch.

Kansas City and San Francisco have had very different seasons to date. The Chiefs are 5-0, undefeated and flying high atop the AFC. The Niners, meanwhile, are 3-3, including a 1-2 record away from home. Not what folks expected from arguably the deepest and most talented roster in the NFC.

Sunday's game is at home for the Niners, back in Levi's Stadium. It's a chance for the 49ers to sneak above .500 and build up legitimate momentum. It's one thing to win a game. It's another to avenge your Super Bowl loss and hand Kansas City its first L of the campaign. That could be the boost this Niners team needs to get back on track.

Whether McCaffrey plays or not, San Francisco has all the offensive firepower necessary to hang with a Chiefs team that has quietly struggled on that end. It has been the Kansas City defense dragging the Chiefs to a bumpy 5-0 start. These Chiefs are not as infallible as they appear from a distance, and the Niners are much better than their record suggests.

49ers legend Jerry Rice appeared on Stacking the Box this week to address a number of topics, including San Francisco's Week 7 showdown with the Chiefs. The former Super Bowl champ was direct in his assessment of what the Niners need to accomplish this Sunday.

Jerry Rice emphasizes the importance of 49ers beating Chiefs in Super Bowl rematch

"You can bounce back by this coming weekend, we got the Chiefs," Rice told FanSided's Ian MacMillan. "We gotta beat the Chiefs."

Simple, to the point, and absolutely correct. There's no way around it. A win galvanizes the fanbase and the locker room, reminding us of what this 49ers team is capable of. A loss is a punch to the gut, and potentially the dying gasp of a lost season. It would be far too early to rule out the Niners at 3-4, but losing to the Chiefs after such an up-and-down start to the season would signal, with abundant clarity, that this team does not have the stuff to back up its reputation.

Jones is speaking from personal experience, of course. He knows what it's like to lose a Super Bowl – and what it takes to get back to the mountaintop.

"It goes back to Dallas, when they took away so many Super Bowls from us. They beat us. And I think it was two or three times, and it just hurt so bad. We just knew that we had to beat them. We were able to do that, then we went on to win the Super Bowl."

So, in theory, this could be how it all starts for the Niners — a storybook revenge game that snowballs into a Super Bowl victory, which San Francisco has not accomplished since 1995, smack in the middle of Rice's heyday.

"It's gonna be a great test this weekend," Rice said, before reiterating his first point. "We gotta beat the Chiefs."

Rice knows it. The Niners know it. We all know it. A win against the Chiefs this weekend means a lot more than a tick in the win column. It could mean the difference between getting back to that elusive Super Bowl stage or sinking into obscurity.