Santa Clara – Kyle Shanahan was a teenager watching from the stands as the heated playoff rivalry between the Dallas Cowboys and the San Francisco 49ers reached a fever pitch with three consecutive NFC title games.
Now, Shanahan will take on a starring role as the 49ers head coach when San Francisco visits Dallas in a wild-card game on Sunday, when one of the great rivalries of the NFL resumes.
“I think it’s the greatest thing (facing Dallas) because that’s the coolest part of my childhood growing up,” Shanahan said. “It was when I was in seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, in the years 92, 93, 94.”
Shanahan immersed himself in the memories of those games as if they happened last week, rather than more than a quarter of a century ago.
“As you can see, I still remember those games,” he said. “Those are part of my childhood, that was such great football because everyone knew that those three NFC championships, those three years were the Super Bowl.”
The history of the 49ers and Cowboys playoff rivalry is striking from back-to-back conference title games in the early 1970s, the iconic ‘Catch’ in the 1981 season, and then the heated rivalry in the 1990s, when the Cowboys won the first two meetings en route to the Super Bowl titles and then the Niners took the third game.
“Wow, games were closed,” Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said on his radio show. “It was just cutting and shoving all the way, and it was a play here, a play there, and that’s what the playoffs are like.”
This will be the eighth time these franchises have met in the postseason, tied for the second-most of any matchup in the Super Bowl era at nine games between the Rams and the Cowboys.
But with six of the previous matchups in the conference title game, few rivalries have had as many big games or star players as Roger Staubach, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Emmitt Smith, Deion Sanders, Steve Young, Troy Aikman and Michael. Irvin.
The playoff rivalry
1970 Final NFC Dallas 17-10 San Francisco
1971 Final NFC San Francisco 3-14 Dallas
1972 Final NFC Dallas 17-10 San Francisco
1981 Final NFC Dallas 27-28 San Francisco
1992 Final NFC Dallas 30-20 San Francisco
1993 Final NFC San Francisco 21-38 Dallas
1994 Final NFC Dallas 28-38 San Francisco
