The San Francisco 49ers will need to defeat more than just the Seattle Seahawks with a Super Bowl berth on the line in the NFC Championship game Sunday. San Francisco arrives in Seattle also needing to overcome the Seahawks not-so-secret weapon, the so-called “12th man.”
That extra “man” is the rabid and boisterous crowd at Seattle’s CenturyLink Field. The 67,000-seat outdoor stadium is expected to be filled to the max for Sunday’s 6:30 Eastern Time / 3:30 Pacific Time start, with the same fans who make nonstop noise and engage in such endearing antics as bombarding running back Marshawn Lynch with Skittles after he scores a touchdown, as Fox Sports reported.
Lynch made the mistake of revealing that Skittles were his favorite candy, hence the copious gift from Seattle’s 12th man.
The fan rivalry has even caught the attention of Madison Avenue. As the Seattle Weekly has noted, earlier this year, a TV commercial advertising Beats By Dre headphones took a jibe at the Seahawks fans, showing San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick donning the headphones to drown out the bellicose Seattle horde.
Then just last week, a new commercial for Duracell batteries returned the favor, though with a more positive spin. It featured the Seahawks’ Derrick Coleman, who is deaf, praising his team’s fans, saying, “I can hear them all.”
The headphone commercial went on line back on December 8 and has amassed 2.9 million views. But the Derrick Coleman battery spot just went up on January 10, collecting 3.1 million views in five days. So the rivalry even extends to YouTube.
Check out the Coleman spot above, and the Kaepernick commercial below.
Of course, those notorious CenturyLink Field fans may not have as much to do with the Seahawks 15-1 home record over the past two regular season schedules as, for example, the players and head coach Pete Carroll. But they don’t hurt.
Now San Francisco will need to overcome Seattle’s “12th man” advantage to advance to the Super Bowl and take on either the Denver Broncos or New England Patriots.
The fact that San Francisco and Seattle have developed perhaps the most heated rivalry in pro football over the past few years is likely to make the 12th man only more aggressive. On San Francisco’s last two attempts to win in CenturyLink Field , NBC Bay Area recounts, they’ve left with heads hung low after defeats by embarrassingly one-sided score lines of 29-3 and 42-13 in 2013 and 2012 respectively.
As a result, the Seahawks are 3 1/2 point favorites over San Francisco going into Sunday’s decisive matchup, broadcast nationally on the Fox Network.
San Francisco and Seattle may seem like unlikely rivals at first glance. But starting 2002, as CBS San Francisco spelled out recently, the two teams were shifted into the same division , the NFC West.
While San Francisco topped the division that year, the bottom quickly fell out. Starting in 2003, the 49ers went eight straight seasons without posting a winning record . Meanwhile, Seattle went on a tear, making the playoffs five years in a row and even earning a trip to the Super Bowl in 2005, though the Seahawks were defeated by the Pittsburgh Steelers.
But in 2010, University of Southern California head coach Carroll took the job at Seattle and the following season, his arch-rival from the college ranks, Stanford’s Jim Harbaugh, moved north in the Bay Area and into the pro ranks, taking over the helm of the San Francisco 49ers.
While the coaches were translating their rivalry to the the NFL, their teams each ascended to the ranks of the NFL’s elite. This year, though San Francisco put together a elite-level 12-4 record, the Seahawks finished at 13-3. Now Seattle and its 12th man meet San Francisco to decide who will represent the NFC in the Super Bowl.