Most head coaches have to come in to fix something broken. That’s not the case in Seattle, where the new coach has experience taking over in a place that has already had success.
Seattle Seahawks GM John Schneider was walking into the Harbor East Starbucks in downtown Baltimore on the morning of Jan. 30 and shot the text over to Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald as a courtesy. Nothing more. Nothing less.“And I’m like, ‘O.K., this is kind of more my vibe,” recalls Macdonald, who’d already interviewed with four other teams.
Schneider knew over the past few years that even if Carroll didn’t show any sign of, or desire to, slow down, the GM had to be ready. To do so, he kept, in his desk, a working list of coaching candidates that he continued to chip away at and research. There were in-house guys. There were old friends working elsewhere. There were coaches he didn’t know.
All of them—since, by then, they were out of the coaching market—could be resources for Seattle. All had interviewed Macdonald. The feedback was consistent.“You’re trusting people you’ve trusted forever,” he continues. “The hardest part would’ve been waiting through the Super Bowl. That would’ve been tough.”
After those 90 or so minutes, Schneider had a pretty good idea of where it was going, and that he’d ask Macdonald to get to Seattle for a second look. It wasn’t 48 hours later before the Seahawks were negotiating with Macdonald’s agents, Jimmy Sexton and Davis Horton at CAA, and the GM and his new coach were sketching out their new collective vision.
In fact, when Macdonald was interviewing for jobs, he was looking for a place that matched the values he’d learned over a decade in the Harbaugh family football program—with nine of those seasons coming under John in Baltimore and one with Jim as Michigan’s defensive coordinator in 2021. All the same, the Seahawks wanted to build off, not push away, the unique culture that Carroll curated in Seattle, starting in ’10.
It might be different language, but principle-wise, there’s a lot of parallels to what John and the guys, and Pete have done here for a long time.” “Scheme-wise, Albert, looking back through the whole process, to look at anything as initial roadblocks is really narrow vision, man,” Macdonald continues. “We can get through all that stuff. In my opinion, I was looking at it as,. Because those are the guys that are gonna project what’s important to , and how they’re gonna coach their guys.”The Seahawks had less time between the hiring cycle and the draft process, but quickly got on the same page.
“ doesn’t meet all the size criteria. That’s the first thing. And so you see the ability on tape, and listening to how our personnel people described this guy as a person, this is our type of dude. I didn’t go into the school, I don’t know anybody at Texas, it’s not like I’m calling those people. It’s going straight off our scouts and our in-house guys. And how they describe him, that’s our type of guy right there.
“This is our team. O.K., what do we need to do to get to the next step? And there’s a lot of s--- we need to do, but what’s tomorrow? Let’s go attack that, and let’s do it again the next day.”He’d come off a monster year at Michigan, through which he’d leveled up the Wolverines’ defense, helped supercharge the draft stock of guys such as Aidan Hutchinson, Dax Hill and David Ojabo, and gave new life to Jim Harbaugh’s program in Ann Arbor.
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