New coach, tougher philosophy: How Mike Macdonald is leading the Seahawks

RENTON, Wash. — When Mike Macdonald was hired by the Seattle Seahawks this past offseason, he brought the Baltimore Ravens‘ notoriously tough conditioning test with him.

Every NFL player must pass one at the start of training camp in order to practice, and the versions vary by team. This one requires them to complete six 150-yard shuttles, with a time limit on each leg that differs depending on position groups. Not finishing any of the six legs in the designated time means failing the test and having to start it over.

“Never want to do it again,” Seahawks wide receiver Laviska Shenault Jr. said. “It’s deadly.”

It might have been predictable that a few young players would fail such a difficult test, requiring them to start camp on the non-football injury list until they could pass. But to the Seahawks’ new head coach, it wasn’t acceptable.

“Macdonald was pissed,” a source close to a player said.

Macdonald chewed out the players individually, according to a team source and a source close to a player, and then brought up the issue in front of the rest of the team in order to drive the point home: You owe it to everyone else to show up in shape.

He told at least one of the players that he’d have been cut on the spot if not for the guaranteed money in his contract, another source close to one of them said.

If it wasn’t already clear to the Seahawks that Macdonald has a different leadership style than his predecessor, Pete Carroll, then that moment left no doubt.

The Seahawks’ decision to move on from Carroll in January changed the organization’s power structure, with longtime general manager John Schneider now holding final say over personnel decisions as well as oversight of the coaching staff. When Schneider and owner Jody Allen hired the former Ravens defensive coordinator, it also meant a change in how the Seahawks will be coached, and Macdonald’s new-sheriff-in-town moment was an early indication.

Whereas Carroll took a gentler approach when it came to holding his players accountable, Macdonald — the NFL’s youngest head coach at 37 — favors an old-school style that includes plenty of tough love. While their philosophies differ, Macdonald still plans to lean on the same defense-and-run-game formula on the field that propelled Carroll to the most wins in franchise history and its lone Super Bowl title.

The Seahawks are finding their footing on the ground, ranking 23rd in rushing yards (97.3 average), but they’ve started the season 3-0 heading into Monday night’s game against the Detroit Lions at Ford Field (8:15 p.m. ET, ABC). With Macdonald calling their defense, they’re allowing the fourth-fewest points in the NFL (14.3), the main reason why they’re one of the league’s five remaining unbeaten teams.

“He’s just big on accountability, which is really important right now because it’s a lot of new players, a new staff, a new way of doing things around here,” defensive tackle Leonard Williams said. “I think when you’re trying to implement something new, it takes a lot on the players and the leaders on the team to hold everyone accountable. … I think he’s doing a good job.”

IN JANUARY, THREE days after the Seahawks beat the Arizona Cardinals to finish 9-8 for a second straight season, the team announced Carroll was out as head coach. It was not a typical firing. The move came after multiple meetings with Allen, who said in a statement the two sides had agreed Carroll would transition into an advisory role.

During his farewell news conference later that day, Carroll made it clear his wish was to continue coaching the team. Allen, who has stayed out of public view since she assumed control of the team in 2018, did not speak at the gathering, and the team’s brief statement offered no insight into why the move was made.

More straightforward was what would happen next.

As Schneider confirmed, a clause in the extension he signed after the 2020 season stipulated he would assume the top spot in Seattle’s football operations department when Carroll left. The two had arrived together in 2010 under an atypical arrangement in which Carroll had final say over personnel decisions and both reported to ownership.

In recent years, the two had discussed the possibility of Carroll, at some point, ceding that power to Schneider. With Carroll out, the general manager was now officially in charge. As the former coach passed the baton, he alluded to the weight that comes with being the organization’s top decision-maker.

“It’s been 14 years, he’s been waiting for his opportunity and he deserves it,” Carroll said. “He’s great at what he does. And now he’s going to find out. Find out, big fella. But he deserves this moment.”

Schneider’s first order of business was the one that may define the rest of his tenure as Seahawks GM — hiring Carroll’s replacement. When Schneider was interviewing for the job in 2010, he was preparing to hire a head coach, only to find out that Carroll was already their man. Fourteen years later, Schneider’s chance had come.

Schneider had been doing homework on potential successors knowing Carroll, well into his 70s and with various interests outside of football, could decide to retire at any time. With some legwork done, he cast a wide net in his search, meeting virtually with at least eight candidates for initial interviews.

Macdonald was squarely on Schneider’s radar, having developed a reputation as one of the NFL’s brightest defensive minds. The Ravens were the league’s top defense the past two seasons, and the Seahawks saw first-hand the issues Macdonald’s scheme created during a 37-3 loss to Baltimore in November. Michigan had also just won a national championship using the defense Macdonald helped build during his lone season as the Wolverines’ DC in 2021.

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Because of the timing of Carroll’s exit, the Seahawks weren’t able to conduct an initial interview with Macdonald during the Ravens’ playoff bye week. Since they missed that initial window, NFL rules stipulated they wait for Baltimore’s season to end. The interview didn’t happen until Jan. 30, two days after the Ravens lost in the AFC Championship Game and almost three weeks after they announced Carroll’s departure.

The Seahawks, according to a team source, had noticed a trend with their earlier interviews, with some candidates impressing them in virtual conversations but not nearly as much during the second, in-person sessions. Macdonald, on the other hand, blew them away when Schneider, Allen, assistant GM Nolan Teasley and the rest of their leadership team met with him face-to-face in Baltimore.

A major selling point was his philosophy on holding players accountable and his three-word motto that embodies it — “make it right.” Schneider found Macdonald to be such an efficient communicator that a two-hour portion of their interview with him felt more like 20 minutes. He would eventually tell his scouting department to be prepared for much quicker conversations with Macdonald than they were used to having with Carroll.

“It was communication, leadership, clarity … that jumps off with Mike,” Schneider said. “I had talked to several people that had interviewed him already and they were like, ‘Wait until you look in this guy’s eyes, man. He’s there. He’s present. He’s on it.’ And he was. Everybody in that room felt it.”

Carroll and Schneider would regularly disagree but ultimately came together on almost every decision, which is how Schneider plans to operate with Macdonald now that he has final say. Schneider said he could count on one or two hands the number of times Carroll had to wield his personnel power.

The more significant change in Schneider’s role is that all the coaches — Macdonald included — now report to him.

Macdonald had spent nine of his 14 seasons as a coach working in one place, having joined John Harbaugh’s staff in Baltimore as an intern in 2014 after three seasons at his alma mater, Georgia. He didn’t have a deep list of coaching contacts, so Schneider worked closely with him to build his staff. The two went to work on it the day before Macdonald was introduced as Seattle’s coach on Feb. 1, trying to make up for lost time.

Macdonald had previously worked alongside four of the 24 assistants they hired, including assistant head coach Leslie Frazier and special teams coordinator Jay Harbaugh. As one Seahawks source put it, Macdonald prioritized the best teachers as opposed to the familiarity of coaching friends.

As the staff was coming together, the two discussed one well-known name that they didn’t end up hiring. Schneider expressed some reservations to Macdonald as well as one thing he liked — the assistant’s ability to be an enforcer.

He loved his new head coach’s response.

“Isn’t that what I’m here for?”

Carroll is still technically employed by the Seahawks, though he isn’t mentioned on their online list of employees, nor has he been spending much time at team headquarters.

Carroll did plan initially to serve in an undetermined advisory role, as his mentor, Bud Grant, had done with the Vikings after his final season as Minnesota’s head coach. But in an August appearance on 93.3 KJR-FM in Seattle — while one of his ex-players, Doug Baldwin, was co-hosting — Carroll said he’s been keeping his distance from the organization. He declined to comment to ESPN for this story and hasn’t done any other media interviews aside from the lone radio appearance, preferring to lay low out of respect for Macdonald and the start of his regime.

“I haven’t talked to those guys at all,” Carroll told the station. “I ran into Mike in the parking lot one day, and it was a great chance to just, the two of us alone, to meet. … I’m not paying that much attention to it because it just feels like it’s the right thing to do to let them go.”

THE FIRST THING Seahawks players mention when describing Macdonald is usually his brain.

“I don’t think Coach knows how smart he is,” linebacker Tyrel Dodson said. “The stuff that he comes up with, I’m like, ‘Wow.’ I’ve just never heard of that. People can be smart and you not understand them. He’s smart and he understands us and he coaches it so well.”

Macdonald, born in Boston and raised in the Atlanta suburb of Roswell, graduated summa cum laude from Georgia with a finance degree before returning to the school to earn his master’s in sports management.

“Nerdy for sure,” cornerback Devon Witherspoon said. “But it is in a good way, though, his own way, and I think that’s what makes him who he is.”

Macdonald’s sense of humor is another facet of his personality that’s often brought up by players, even if his jokes don’t always land in team meetings.

“We laugh with him because it’s like, ‘OK, we see where you were going there, but it didn’t come across how you wanted it to,'” cornerback Tre Brown said. “But we love him, man. He’s a friendly guy.”

Macdonald isn’t hard on players as a default, Brown said, only when he needs to be.

One such moment came at the end of a practice early in training camp, when Macdonald saw a group of young players heading inside in defiance of instructions to sign autographs. He caught up to one of them and gave him an earful, sternly ordering an undrafted rookie to the berm across the field, where fans were waiting.

Another rookie who witnessed the exchange exclaimed with a grin, “Mike does not play.”

Those who played for Carroll and worked under him say they never saw him dole out discipline that way, even behind the scenes. The ultimate players’ coach, he believed in empowering them as a means of getting the most out of them, which meant giving plenty of leeway and leading more like a father figure than an authoritarian. He was willing to deal with the inevitable downside of that approach — the free spirits who would take more rope than he gave.

“Philosophy is a lot different,” Brown said of the change in coaches.

“Make it right,” which Macdonald adopted during his early days in Baltimore, embodies the standard he wants his players to meet both on and off the field. It’s about correcting mistakes or avoiding them in the first place, about making it clear what won’t fly while leaving no room for ambiguity.

“There’s going to be mistakes made out there,” Macdonald said. “Let’s take accountability, let’s not point fingers and let’s move forward. It just made sense on how to do business with the guys and how you want to be coached. You don’t want it to be personal. … It’s easier to coach that way, when you’re not blaming the person, you’re blaming the action of what’s going on and trying to coach that.”

Said offensive passing game coordinator Jake Peetz of Macdonald’s plain-spoken style: “He’s very much like, hit you between the eyes, very direct. You don’t really have a lot of guesswork on where you stand because he’s going to come to you with information … and he knows how to say … ‘This is what I want, how I want it,’ and he can prepare his guys to get it done.”

Macdonald’s fine system — more strictly enforced than Carroll’s — includes a $500 penalty for showing up even one minute late to a meeting, according to one player. Being overweight and missing physical therapy sessions are other finable offenses.

“It comes up every day,” cornerback Artie Burns said of the saying. “A simple mistake on a coverage: Make it right, get it fixed and we’ll live on the next play. A minute late to meetings: Make it right, you’re fined up, don’t do it again. It’s just an easy way to get it solved and know, hey, the standard is the standard, don’t slip away from it, and just make it right.”

WITH A WIN Monday night, Macdonald would become the first rookie head coach since Dan Quinn in 2015 to start 4-0. According to ESPN Research, it’s happened 10 times since 1970.

The Seahawks have benefited from a soft schedule out of the gate that included hosting the Denver Broncos in Bo Nix‘s NFL debut and the Miami Dolphins without Tua Tagovailoa. The next month will test them. They’re banged up on both sides of the ball and have a much tougher slate of quarterbacks on the horizon, including Jared Goff on Monday night and then Brock Purdy, Josh Allen and Matthew Stafford before their bye in Week 10.

But so far, their new schemes on both sides of the ball are taking hold, and so is Macdonald’s “make it right” message.

“From my perspective, what makes it work is when the whole team is bought into the system,” Williams said. “We hold each other accountable now. … If it was always coming from Mike, it would probably be easy to be like, ‘Oh, Mike’s the bad guy,’ or something like that.

“In our own D-line room, we have our own ‘make it right’ system where now we hold each other accountable. So it’s almost like the whole team has just bought into that type of mindset.”