The Seattle Seahawks will play the San Francisco 49ers on Saturday, for the third time this season, as part of the divisional round of the playoffs.

With Wild Card weekend for the NFC all settled and finished, the Seahawks know they will be playing their division rival, the San Francisco 49ers on Saturday in the divisional round. During the regular season, Seattle and San Francisco split their divisional matchups, each winning one game. In Week 1, the 49ers bested Seattle, 17-13, and in Week 18, Seattle and its defense won 13-3.

Seattle is coming off their bye week, giving players a few days of rest before getting back to work this week. Head coach Mike Macdonald wanted to be sure to give the players some time off.

"It's kind of the million-dollar question, right?" he said. "How much do you rest? I thought we felt like we tried to keep it on cadence as much as possible in terms of what their body rhythm would be. And then just trust the guys that they were still going to take care of their bodies and get the proper amount of rest over those three days. We've had some longer weeks throughout the year where we've been pretty work intensive and I felt like it was just kind of like mentally draining for us. I think we've proved to ourselves we can, in a week's time, put together a great plan and get ready to play a game. And so we wanted to keep that cadence as close as possible."

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.

"We got a great division," Macdonald said. "Those guys, they've earned, I think all three of us, we've earned to be in this position. So I think it's pretty cool actually."

Macdonald said he and some of the coaches got together to watch the games this week and from the 49ers game he said, "I think just watching it live, it was just an incredibly resilient win. I mean, team has a lot of character. They're really tough, but really it's nothing new with these guys. It's what you know, but it's a heck of a win. It's a tough place to go and play and get a win."

While there may be distractions, Macdonald and company are sticking to their process and taking it one game at a time, like they have been all season, and doing what's been working for them.

"I think we talked about it today, but the distractions really are leading up to the game, in my opinion. And so, our focus is about all the things that we can do throughout the week to keep our process the same that it's what it's been the whole year. And so, if I'm a young player, just having a plan, understand how I want to attack the week and making sure I'm doing the things that I can control every day so that we can go play football when the ball's kicked off. I mean, it's really that simple, but these are the things we've talked about throughout the season. At some point we're going to, in our program, we're going to end up in a place where we want to be and it's going to be a first for us. And why would you make it any different than what got you to this point?"