49ers schedule release: 3 games that should have been prime time

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Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay (left) talks with San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports /

No. 1: Week 18 — 49ers at Rams

There’s an awfully good chance both San Francisco and the Los Angeles Rams are jockeying for a playoff berth on the final week of the regular season.

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The Rams just managed to scrape in last year with a 10-6 record, which included two losses to the 49ers. And after jettisoning quarterback Jared Goff to the Detroit Lions, whom the Niners will see in Week 1, head coach Sean McVay is pinning his offense’s hopes on the veteran signal-caller, Matthew Stafford.

Stafford owns a 1-3 career record against San Francisco. But those four bouts frequently featured lackluster Lions teams, and McVay’s offense is poised to put Stafford into the best possible position to make a postseason push.

And what better way to see if it happens than to close out the 2021 regular season?

NFC West rivalry games are always entertaining, and that’s not just divisional fans’ biases speaking. But unfortunately, the realization of an East Coast bias probably prevented the schedule-makers from allowing this to happen, the only recent exception being the 49ers and Seattle Seahawks closing out 2019 in epic fashion.

We’ll never know if the Niners and Rams could have closed out the regular season with all the hype and drama of a classic San Francisco-Seattle game.

But it would have been nice to see nonetheless.

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