The 49ers have developed quite the NFC West rivalry with the Los Angeles Rams in recent years.
San Francisco has had the upper hand in the regular season, winning eight straight non-playoff matchups, but former Rams left tackle Andrew Whitworth told NBC Sports Bay Area's Matt Maiocco on the latest "49ers Talk" podcast that he believes 49ers players would trade that regular-season success for a win over the Rams in the 2021 NFC Championship Game.
"I think as much as the bragging rights are for all the wins, I think if you ask any Niners player, in their heart they'd much rather have that NFC Championship Game than those other ones," Whitworth told Maiocco. "No different for us. It's one of those things, the 49ers are an amazing football team. You look at defensively, offensively, how they're built, the structure they've done as far as putting that team together."
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After losing the first six regular-season games between the two teams in the Kyle Shanahan-Sean McVay era, Whitworth and the Rams came to the realization that the 49ers were going to be a serious problem.
"It's one of those things, I thought the last year there where we lost at the end of the season before the NFC Championship Game, I thought that was the first time us as Rams thought, 'You know what, this is just flat out a good football team and we're not playing good enough to beat them,' " Whitworth recalled. "I think that's why the response in the NFC championship was what it was."
The 49ers-Rams rivalry was taken to another level when San Francisco fans started to pack SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles during the 2021 NFL season, referring to the venue as "Levi's South" while essentially stripping the Rams of any home-field advantage they would have had.
Whitworth and the Rams were stunned and were forced to use silent counts on offense in their own stadium because of how loud 49ers fans were. However, Los Angeles soon adapted to the inevitable sea of red and gold and started to prepare as if they were playing the NFC Championship Game on the road.
San Francisco 49ers
"When we got to the NFC championship and they were coming to town, I think we treated it as a given," Whitworth said of the 49ers fan invasion. "They're going to have a ton of fans, it's going to be loud, we're going to prepare for the silent count the whole game even though it's our home stadium and we're going to have to just deal with it and whatever the circumstances are of the game, we're just going to have to overcome them. The 49ers Faithful is special man, they travel well and I've got to give it to them. I don't know if I've ever been on a silent count so many times in my career in my home stadium."
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As much regular-season success as the 49ers have had against the Rams, Whitworth and San Francisco's own players know that only one game matters the most. That game was a crushing 20-17 loss for the 49ers that ended a special season and essentially washed away years of regular-season success against the Rams.