The circumstances that necessitated the hiring of Mike Macdonald are essential to keep in mind when assessing his first year as head coach of the Seattle Seahawks.
Go back to general manager John Schneider’s remarks the week after Pete Carroll was fired following last season.
“We are all here today because we underachieved in 2023,” Schneider said in a news conference at team headquarters on Jan. 16.
The organization felt the Seahawks should have been more than a 9-8 team that entered Week 18 with a chance to sneak into the playoffs, which was the case in 2022 and 2023. Macdonald was hired to elevate them.
One year later, Seattle is stuck on the same level.
The Seahawks enter Week 18 having already captured their ninth victory, but there will be no magic at the eleventh hour this season, as they’ve already been eliminated from postseason contention. The Rams clinched the NFC West on Sunday night due to the strength of victory tiebreaker.
Seattle can reach 10 wins for the first time since 2020 by defeating the Rams in Week 18, but there’s a chance the team could be playing Los Angeles’ backups. A 10th win would be an improvement on paper but meaningless in the grand scheme. This will be the first time Seattle has missed the playoffs in consecutive years since the 2008 and 2009 seasons.
The missteps that took Seattle’s fate out of its hands in the past few seasons were obvious. In 2022, the Seahawks suffered four one-score losses to the entire NFC South, whose division champion had a losing record (the 8-9 Buccaneers). In 2023, a last-second loss on the road to the Rams in Week 11 was a tough pill to swallow, as was Seattle’s Week 13 defeat in Dallas (not to mention a Week 17 loss at home to the Mason Rudolph-led Steelers).
This year, the Seahawks lost at home to the New York Giants, arguably the worst team in football. They also couldn’t get 1 yard in overtime of a Week 9 loss to the Rams, nor could they score on either of their final two possessions in Week 16 against Minnesota. The NFL has so many moving parts that it’s not as simple as flipping all the results of the narrow losses and imagining a more successful year, but those games stick out like sore thumbs when reflecting on the Seahawks’ season.
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On Friday, Macdonald said when you don’t control your fate, “You’re always going to think of moments that you felt like you could have taken advantage of better to put yourself in a better position.” He also said Seattle might not have won some other games or put itself in position to win had it not learned, evolved and stuck together during the ebbs and flows of the season.
“Any time we take the field, we’re going to expect to win the game, and we’re going to try to do those things necessary to win,” Macdonald said. “When we don’t, that’s when you have to learn from it. All of the losses you’re really thinking, Shoot, those sting. That’s the fact of the reality.”
Macdonald inherited some of the highest expectations among the coaches hired this offseason. Unlike his peers in New England (Jerod Mayo), Los Angeles (Jim Harbaugh), Atlanta (Raheem Morris), Las Vegas (Antonio Pierce), Tennessee (Brian Callahan), Carolina (Dave Canales) and Washington (Dan Quinn), Macdonald didn’t take over a team trying to rebuild. He was expected to be an immediate upgrade from Carroll and take Seattle to the playoffs, at minimum. The Seahawks were in position to do that entering Week 15 at 8-5 atop the NFC West with home games against the Packers and Vikings. They were outscored 57-37 in a pair of losses.
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Seattle achieved its 9-8 record in 2022 with a point differential of plus-6. The next season, the team had the same record but was outscored by 38 points. This season, it has a plus-2 point differential. When including the team’s 7-10 record and plus-29 point differential in 2021, the Seahawks have basically taken different paths to being an average football team since their division title and wild-card loss in 2020.
Life in the league’s middle class wasn’t good enough for Schneider and Seattle’s Jody Allen-led ownership group, but Year 1 of their attempt to step into the elite class was unsuccessful.
The Seahawks lost their way defensively in the post-Legion of Boom era, and one of Macdonald’s tasks in his first year was to fix that side of the ball. There were some bumps along the road, but Macdonald has done well there. The Seahawks have a top-10 defense by EPA per play (eighth) and points per drive (fifth), according to TruMedia. They came up small in the final two home games, but the entire body of work suggests reason for optimism on defense under Macdonald’s leadership.
The same cannot be said for Seattle’s offense, which ranks 21st in EPA per play and 23rd in points per drive. The Seahawks ranked 10th and 12th in those categories last season. And many of Seattle’s problems under offensive coordinator Shane Waldron were present in Ryan Grubb’s first year in the NFL, except this year’s unit was worse.
Seattle once again didn’t field a competent offensive line, and inconsistency up front made life hard on quarterback Geno Smith and the running backs. The Seahawks spent most of the season lamenting the same issues — self-inflicted wounds, the inability to get the run game going, short-yardage struggles and red zone woes, to name a few.
In one of his first meetings with the offense, Grubb told the team he wanted the run game to be their bread and butter, but Seattle had one of the highest early down pass rates in the league this season. They didn’t run the ball very often, nor were they good at it. And as with the previous regime, the team’s offensive identity on Sundays didn’t match what the coaches were saying Monday through Saturday.
Macdonald also hired a first-year special teams coordinator in Jay Harbaugh, whose unit had its ups and downs throughout the season. There were moments such as the blocked field goal that was returned for a touchdown to end the Giants game and the nightmare day against the Jets in Week 13 that resulted in both the kickoff and punt returners being released. Seattle had to use a waiver claim in Week 14 on Jaelon Darden just to have someone Macdonald could trust to catch and hold onto the ball. Assuming Macdonald isn’t going anywhere this offseason, will he make any coordinator changes?
Nine (or 10) wins in Macdonald’s first year can be deemed a success when measured by Las Vegas preseason win total projections (Seattle’s was 7.5) or when viewed in the context of the typical growing pains that come with hiring a rookie head coach, let alone the youngest in the league. But the people inside Seattle’s building are unlikely to see it that way. The Seahawks looked at this team winning nine games over the last two seasons and decided that mediocrity was synonymous with underachievement. Overhauling the coaching staff was supposed to be the difference. But Macdonald’s Seahawks simply found a different way to fall short of expectations.
It’s unclear what happens next for Seattle in the short term, as in whether Macdonald will sit some of his starters in a meaningless Week 18 game. The long-term outlook is murky, too. The Seahawks will enter 2025 tight on cap space and with a first-round draft pick outside the top 14. A decision must be made on Smith, who has indicated he wants a new contract. Ernest Jones IV is headed for unrestricted free agency. The standouts from the 2022 draft class — Charles Cross, Ken Walker III, Boye Mafe, Abe Lucas, Coby Bryant, Riq Woolen — are eligible for extensions. DK Metcalf is, too. Then there’s the matter of the offensive line, which again needs a makeover.
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It’s also unclear whether another major shakeup at the top of the organization is coming. This time last year, Carroll was held accountable for the team’s shortcomings and Schneider was given the keys to the future. Will Schneider take the blame after another year of underachieving?
(Photo of Mike Macdonald: Quinn Harris / Getty Images)
