Another rivalry dead: Seahawks-49ers just isn’t nearly as fun anymore

When the San Francisco 49ers found themselves down 17 points in the fourth quarter, head coach Jim Tomsula sent out the punt team — twice in a two-minute span with less than five minutes remaining. He might as well have been punting on the season.

Here’s what the 49ers’ possessions looked like in the 49ers’ 20-3 loss Thursday night to the Seattle Seahawks:

PUNT
PUNT
PUNT
PUNT
PUNT
END OF HALF
PUNT
FG
PUNT
PUNT
PUNT

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Nine punts. Eight first downs.

The fact that Tomsula continued calling timeouts (presumably to get the ball back?) made his strategy and the 49ers’ performance, all 142 yards worth on 48 offensive snaps, all the more laugable.

But there was sadness mixed in, too: With the loss came the death of one of the NFL’s best rivalries not long ago. Seahawks-49ers used to be appointment TV. It was strength on strength. Guts on guts. Pete Carroll vs. Jim Harbaugh. Russell Wilson vs. Colin Kaepernick, which was brewing as the Brady vs. Manning of its time.

Time to stop milking a dead cow. You can call it: Time of death was roughly 8 p.m. west coast time when this awful game finshed ever so mercifully. I’d rather sit through 11 more hours of Benghazi hearings than more of this.

There were still hard hits. There were still sacks; tons of them in fact: six for Seattle, five for San Fran. One out of every 5.4 dropbacks resulted in a sack. There were hard hits. There was Marshawn Lynch running through people. It had all the elements of a 49ers-Seahawks game, it had the requisite low-scoring total. But it had none of the purpose, fire or drama of past installments. It was — gasp — boring.

When was the last time a game between these teams didn’t hold some interest? Those non-paid viewers who stayed for the duration of this one will never get that time back in their lives.

This was a battle for last place. The 2-5 49ers now sit alone at the bottom of the NFC West, their demise not shocking as much as it is depressing. This team showed incredible spunk in beating the Minnesota Vikings Week 1 and looked competitive the past two weeks with a late loss to the New York Giants and a win over the Baltimore Ravens.

But Thursday’s performance against the Seahawks showed us this team is not good. Say what you want about the Seahawks — that they still are the team that has made the past two Super Bowls, that they have a way of flipping the switch every season, whatever. This was an ugly win for Seattle, which did what it had to do to remain in contention at 3-4 but hardly blew the 49ers’ doors off.

We can discuss ad nauseum whether the Seahawks can find their groove for the next month or more. But one thing is clear: Their rivalry with the 49ers is dead. Bury it. It’s never going to be the same.

Even in an equally poor showing a year ago on Thanksgiving, we got this from 49ers owner Jed York.

The smarter move for York Thursday night would be to seek shelter.

After turning in a putrid effort, more than one 49er — including Kaepernick — seemed almost chummy with the Seahawks at midfield. Now let’s not get this confused: Guys have friends in the league, even those who play for rivals. Yes, they talk. Yes, they can be civil. But the tenor following some of the most gut-wrenching battles between these two teams, take your pick, they rarely felt so tame. So … meaningless.

The players might disagree publicly, but deep down they have to know: The second Harbaugh walked out of that door, it was gone. The Seahawks got the upper hand, winning six of the 11 matchups in the Harbaugh-Carroll era, and they won a Super Bowl, going through the Niners — in one of the more thrilling and brutal NFC title games we’ll ever see — to get there.

Head-to-head records during the Harbaugh-Carroll era (pro-football-reference.com)

And with it went any chance of Kaepernick regaining that one-throw-from-winning-a-Super-Bowl form, which means that as long as Russell Wilson is a Seahawk and Kaepernick is a 49er, this is going to be a one-sided affair. Ditto for Carroll and Tomsula.

Asked after the game on NFL Network if he thought this remained one of the NFL’s best rivalries, Seahawks safety Earl Thomas had little to offer.

“We still gotta play them again,” he said.

Even the rarely shackled Richard Sherman had little to add.

“Like I said earlier in the week, we don’t think of it as a rivalry,” Sherman said. “They’re a division opponent. We see them more frequently than we do a lot of other teams. So we respect them as a division opponent, and we’re familiar with them in that sense. But we don’t think of them and rivalries and things like that.”

There you go. If you didn’t know it by watching this crummy game, Thomas and Sherman delivered the news: RIP, Seahawks-49ers. It was a fun four-plus years. There might be a dozen better division rivalries in the NFL right now. But this thing is dead, yo.