San Francisco 49ers’ 2023 Schedule Features Two Potentially Season-Defining Stretches

There are plenty of tough tests on the San Francisco 49ers’ 2023 schedule, but two stretches of their coming campaign stand out as ones that may reveal most about the ability of this team to contend to go deep into the playoffs yet again.

The route San Francisco will need to take to another postseason berth was revealed on Thursday as the full NFL schedule was released, with the Niners opening their campaign on the road against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Primetime home games with the New York Giants in Week 3 and the Dallas Cowboys in Week 5 – the latter a rematch of last season’s NFC Divisional Round clash – figure to provide an early barometer of where San Francisco stands in the NFC pecking order.

That reunion with the Cowboys starts a run of games that should offer a gauge of the 49ers’ Super Bowl credentials.

Road games with the Cleveland Browns and Minnesota Vikings follow. The 49ers then host the Cincinnati Bengals and visit the Jacksonville Jaguars either side of a Week 9 bye.

In that five-game stretch, the 49ers will face four teams who also played in last season’s Divisional Round and one of the more talented non-playoff teams from 2022 in the Browns.

Should the 49ers come through that sequence in position near the top of the NFC, most will pencil them in for another postseason surge. San Francisco has reached at least the NFC Championship Game in three of the last four seasons.

Yet arguably an even more imposing and potentially season-defining run lies in wait from Week 12 to Week 14, when the 49ers face two games against NFC West rivals the Seattle Seahawks, sandwiched by an NFC Championship Game rematch with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Brock Purdy’s elbow injury on the first series of the title game robbed the NFL world of what most expected to be a classic. The Eagles instead romped to a 31-7 win over a 49ers team that ended the game without a healthy recognised quarterback.

The Eagles lost defensive tackle Javon Hargrave to the 49ers in free agency, but a 2023 draft class considered among the best in the NFL saw Philadelphia stack the deck further as they added a host of top prospects to arguably the best roster in the league.

And with the Seahawks selecting premier talent at cornerback and wide receiver in Devon Witherspoon and Jaxon Smith-Njigba in the first round, a team the 49ers handily beat three times last campaign looks set up to offer a sterner challenge in the NFC West.

That triumvirate of games could well decide if the 49ers retain their division title and if they are in contention to take the number one seed in the NFC.

It would be foolish to discount the rest of the games on the 49ers’ schedule. However, for a team widely anticipated to remain a resident of the NFC’s elite, it is those eight matchups that may go a long way to determining if the Niners live up to such lofty expectations.