So, on Monday, the Seahawks had meetings and conditioning but will get back to their regularly scheduled walk throughs and practices for the rest of the week. Playing the same opponent in back-to-back games presents its own challenges that Macdonald and the team are preparing to handle.

“I think it’s what you make it,” he said. “Classic Seahawk fashion, maybe we probably overthink some things. Try not to, but I think it’s maybe an accelerated timeframe than you normally would from another divisional game that you play twice with not quite enough sample in between to see where they’re going. So you’re really just going off of how you felt like you played the game, things you did well, maybe where you think they might take things.”

Even though it is such a quick turnaround from the last time Seattle played the 49ers, Macdonald said they’re not, “going to change for the sake of changing” when it comes to the game plan.

“There’s things in the game plan [from Week 18] that we didn’t get to. I’m sure there’s things in their game plan they didn’t get to and to use the game declaring itself type thing. You don’t know how these games are going to go. And so this game is going to play out. There’s about a 99.999 percent chance it’s going to play out way different than the last one. And you got to do a great job of recognizing it and making the adjustments and doing all that type of stuff.”

Both games during the regular season were low-scoring affairs and Macdonald said these matchups against the 49ers are about being good in “all three phases.”

“The things that determine games in our league, it’s kind of magnified in these games,” he said. “So you’re talking about situational football, how you take care of the ball, how you finish in the red zone. Third down is a big time, two-minute [offense]. That’s a cliche answer, but really, when the teams that have kind of won those situations, I felt like has really had the nod in terms of the outcome of the game. But again, I told the team today, it’s like, these are the things that we’ve been working on for all of our opponents. So really nothing changes in terms of our process and the things that we’re trying to do.”

For emphasis of how much everything in these matchups against the 49ers has been magnified this season is the fact that three of the four NFC West teams will play during the divisional round. This has only happened three times before in the NFL.