SANTA CLARA — This matchup stinks.

Thursday evening, the 49ers and Seahawks will celebrate Thanksgiving. They are two good football teams. They will crash into each other viciously. They will decide which team owns the inside path to the NFL playoffs.

And that stinks.

It does not stink because of the eagerly anticipated competitive encounter between two talented rosters. That should be terrific to watch. It stinks because the NFL has demanded that this huge contest must be played only four days after the 49ers and Seahawks endured the last moments of their previous car wrecks … excuse me, their previous games.

But they might as well be car wrecks, in terms of the toll they take on the players’ bodies. Former 49ers quarterback Steve Young once made that analogy. He was not being hyperbolic.

I have been in enough NFL locker rooms after games. I have watched doctors perform triage, watched some players limp to the buses, watched other players need help putting on their shirts because their shoulders and arms are so sore.

And who knows what I don’t see? Ask any pro football player about what it’s like to recover physically from a Sunday game and he will usually tell you that he is in agony Monday, has limited movement Tuesday and does not feel right until Thursday or Friday. If then.

However, in today’s NFL, television revenue is blind to human pain. An insatiable public desire to view the league’s “product” has resulted in a schedule that now includes Thursday night games every week, along with the usual Sunday and Monday games (as well as Saturday games late in the season).

The 49ers will have no contact practices this week. The entire schedule is compressed. Greg Roman, the 49ers’ offensive coordinator, acknowledged that this creates mental and corporeal stress.

“Everybody in the league pretty much goes through it with a Thursday game,” Roman said Tuesday. “Both teams have the same challenge.”

Yes, but here is the particularly twisted element about Thursday at Levi’s Stadium: This isn’t Jaguars vs. Falcons, with nothing much at stake. This is 49ers vs. Seahawks. The NFL is forcing two of the league’s best and most hard-slamming teams to engage in one of the season’s most crucial games after minimal downtime. That’s unfair for fans and players, even if they agreed to it in their last union contract.

Don’t take my word for it. Richard Sherman, the mouthy Seattle defensive back, actually said something incisive this week. Sherman noted the hypocrisy of a league that claims it has new focus on “player safety” while at the same time requiring its employees to pound the holy snot out of each other in games less than 100 hours apart.

Tuesday, I went looking for a few 49ers players to corroborate or dispute Sherman’s sentiment. But during the “media availability” period, the locker room was almost empty. I imagined the entire 49ers roster sitting in a giant hot tub somewhere, soothing sore bones.

In one corner of the locker room, I did spot a large whiteboard that outlined this week’s suggested recuperate-and-revitalize procedures, day by day. There were 10 or 10 or 11 recommended treatments, vitamin shots and massages. And in the upper right corner of the whiteboard, here was the overriding message: “IT’S ALL ABOUT THE 21 HOURS: 3 hours practice a day, 21 hours recovery.”

The instructions came courtesy of coach Jim Harbaugh, who has made a science of this stuff.

“I think he does a great job of really kind of letting the guys tempo and build up during the week,” Roman said of Harbaugh. “On a short week, it’s not like you’re going to reinvent the wheel. It’s more about getting guys going full speed mentally just so they can go play fast on game day.”

Let’s not be naive, though. Massages alone won’t do it. Many men on both sides will need injections of pain-numbing and muscle-soothing substances to get through Thursday’s mayhem.

One former NFL player has told me how, before one Thursday game when receiving his usual Toradol injection, he was surprised to see a few members of the officiating crew lined up for the same treatment. It seems even the referees find the Sunday-Thursday turnaround a tough assignment.

Previous games between the 49ers and Seahawks have been brutal affairs, with both teams feeling the effects for weeks afterward. Will it be the same Thursday?

“I think it’ll be their instinct to just go,” 49ers defensive coordinator Vic Fangio said. “In the atmosphere, you get a sold-out stadium, the excitement … that takes over.”

That’s what scares me. I thought about all this last Sunday night when, before 49ers offensive tackle Joe Staley did his interviews after the victory over Washington, he attached two small silver-dollar-sized devices to a couple of his limbs. The devices began blinking and purring, trying to stimulate blood flow and speed up healing. Later this week, I spotted fullback Bruce Miller carrying around another boxy stimulation device, with tubes attached to his own injured body part.

We will discover so much Thursday night. We will learn if the 49ers’ fits-and-starts offense can get points against Seattle’s smash-mouth defense. We will find out if the Levi’s atmosphere can truly provide a home-field advantage in big games.

But in the end, we’ll primarily discover which team can tolerate the most pain and withstand the most cruel tissue damage while almost incidentally trying to execute football plays. Is that any way to decide a winning team in such a critical game?

Why do I get the melancholy feeling that it’s exactly what the NFL wants?

Contact Mark Purdy at mpurdy@mercurynews.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/MercPurdy.