49ers

The last time a team reached the Super Bowl without a wild- card bye: the 2012 Baltimore Ravens, who beat out the 49ers for the Lombardi Trophy.

Before the NFL gets to this season’s playoffs, a 16-game slate of regularseason games is expected, league executive Jeff Pash said on a conference call with reporters. A 17-game schedule, as part of the new CBA, won’t start until 2021 or 2022.

Not included in last season’s NFC playoffs was the defending champion Los Angeles Rams. The playoff expansion came a year too late for them. They were the last team to miss the postseason cut, doing so a year after falling in the Super Bowl to the Patriots.

“We were the secondworst team in the league last year (in 2018), and now we have to live with being the second-best (in 2019), which I’m proud of,

but that is harder because I truly believe it was there for us,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan said Feb. 28, the last time he or any team official spoke to the media.

Since NFL realignment in 2002, of all the teams coming off Super Bowl defeats, only two finished seventh in their conference and out of the playoffs — the 2019 Rams and 2008 New England Patriots, the latter of whom lost Tom Brady to a knee injury in their season opener.

That said, nine of the past 11 Super Bowl losers went on to make the playoffs the following season.

As for this coming season, presuming it is not delayed nor eliminated by the coronavirus pandemic, the league announced the following:

• Division champions still will earn the top four seeds per conference, with wild- card teams seeded Nos. 5-7.

• Three wild-card games are scheduled for both Saturday, Jan. 9, and Sunday, Jan. 10; It will be No. 2 vs. No. 7, No. 3 vs. No. 6 and No. 4 vs. No. 5.