The Seahawks might not have hired Dan Quinn as their coach, but John Schneider and Mike Macdonald sure took a couple of pages out of his coaching manual as they selected Macdonald’s coordinators.
The obvious tie is new DC Aden Durde, who worked for Quinn in Atlanta from 2018 to 2020. He now becomes the first British-born defensive coordinator in NFL history, and Macdonald surely is counting on his teaching abilities to help fix Seattle’s front seven. More on him later.
The more intriguing – and significant — hire is OC Ryan Grubb, who oversaw UW’s high-octane offense the past two years. There is a crazy Quinn-UW-Alabama triangle going on with this move.
The Hawks have to hope it works out better for them than it did for Quinn’s Falcons a few years ago or for most of the teams over the past 20-25 years that have tried to elevate a college play caller with no prior NFL experience.
The Sarkisian failure
Let’s take it back to 2017. Quinn’s Falcons had just lost the Super Bowl to the Patriots in horrifying fashion (a familiar feeling for Quinn, who also lost to the Patriots with Seattle in Super Bowl XLIX).
Kyle Shanahan, Quinn’s OC in Atlanta, had spearheaded the top-scoring offense in the NFL in 2016. That feat earned him the main job with the 49ers (whom he now has back in the Super Bowl himself for the second time).
Quinn needed a new OC, and he decided to bring in Steve Sarkisian, who had spent 2016 as an offensive analyst for Nick Saban at Alabama after USC had fired him. Quinn knew Sarkisian from their shared time in Seattle, where Quinn had been with the Hawks and Sarkisian had coached UW (2009-13).
Sarkisian had never coached in the NFL before, and it showed in Atlanta. He was unable to sustain what Shanahan had built with QB Matt Ryan and company. The offense fell from the No. 1 scoring unit (33.8 ppg) under Shanahan to 15th (22.1ppg) and 10th (25.9 ppg) in Sarkisian’s two years there.
Sarkisian and Quinn’s other coordinators (including former Seahawk Marquand Manuel) were fired after the 2018 season, when the Falcons went 7-9.
Quinn essentially admitted that Sarkisian was in over his head at the NFL level: “Heading in, I thought he was a really good coach. … But it was challenging. That’s not to say he didn’t grasp it. But it was harder than I thought.”
The Seahawks have to hope that is not the case for Grubb, another former UW (and very briefly Alabama) assistant who is the first play caller to come to the NFL with zero pro experience since Kliff Kingsbury was hired as Arizona’s head coach in 2019.
Grubb’s path to NFL
Over the last 25 years, not many have made that leap – and even fewer have really done it well. Steve Spurrier and Kingsbury, who both were acclaimed offensive coaches in college, both failed as head coaches calling their plays in the NFL (although Kingsbury is getting another shot as an OC in Washington under Quinn).
The best example of a college-to-NFL jump by an OC over the past 25 years also has ties to UW and the Seahawks. Scott Linehan was an assistant at UW for five years in the mid-1990s and then went to Louisville to be the OC.
Mike Tice, a former Seahawks tight end, had just taken over the Vikings in 2002 after an interim stint in 2001, and he brought in Linehan to run the offense. With Daunte Culpepper and Randy Moss leading the way, the Vikings were a top-10 offense in all three of Linehan’s seasons. He parlayed that into a job as coach of the Rams.
That is what Macdonald surely would like to see from Grubb: getting the most out of the talent he has.
“We have a diverse skillset,” Macdonald said when he was hired. “How do we get these guys doing what they do really well?”
More specific to Seattle’s situation, we should look at defensive coaches who hired college play callers. There are only a couple over the last 25 years – and neither worked.
But, in a roundabout way, they coincidentally led to Grubb joining the Seahawks.
When Dick Jauron – a defensive coach under Mike Holmgren in Green Bay — was hired by the Bears in 1999, he brought Gary Crowton to be his OC. Crowton had been the coach at Louisiana Tech (1996-98) and had no pro experience. He lasted two years with the Bears before going back to college (as BYU’s coach, three years after Sarkisian had been the quarterback there).
Lovie Smith succeeded Jauron with the Bears in 2004 and coached there for nine seasons before being fired. But he quickly landed another job, in Tampa Bay in 2014.
He decided to bring Cal coach Jeff Tedford – a noted QB developer who had coached Aaron Rodgers — in as his OC. But Tedford never really coached for the Bucs as he dealt with a heart problem for most of that season. The Bucs ranked 29th in points and 30th in yards in 2014 and Tedford moved on – first to the BC Lions of the CFL and then to UW as a consultant for one year.
Then he landed the top coaching job at Fresno State in 2017, and he brought Kalen DeBoer and Grubb in as assistants. DeBoer went to Indiana in 2019 and Grubb became OC at Fresno State; he kept that post when DeBoer returned in 2020 to replace Tedford, who yet again stepped away from football for health reasons.
Two years later, DeBoer and Grubb – with an assist from Tedford — landed at UW and built a national championship runner-up behind a potent passing offense.
Schneider and Macdonald clearly are hoping Grubb can repeat that success in the NFL – that he is more Linehan than Sarkisian, Kingsbury or Crowton.
‘Chasing edges’
Macdonald has a track record of getting the most out of his players, of maximizing their skill and fitting them into his system or his system around them. And that seems to be a big theme with the hires of Durde and Grubb.
When he was introduced as the Seahawks’ coach – at 36, the new youngest coach in the NFL – Macdonald said he had specific criteria for the assistants he was looking to hire: “I want to see a track record of being able to connect with your players and a growth mindset. I want clarity in what they’re asking from their players.”
Macdonald also told Seattle Sports 710: “We wanna stay cutting edge. We’re going to use a term around here called ‘chasing edges.’ There’s going to be a sense of urgency with what we’re doing. … We’re going to be relentless in the pursuit of it.”
The hires of Durde and Grubb certainly qualify as “chasing edges.”
Durde, who helped develop players in Europe, is known as a teacher.
Jerome Henderson, who coached with him in Dallas, once said of Durde: “I think one of his gifts is he strips it down, the learning process, to the very beginning and doesn’t assume that you know anything. And he teaches from there and builds from there. And he has this unique ability to understand where people are at and what they need.”
That certainly jibes with Macdonald’s style.
Grubb’s ability to develop offensive linemen and flex to his offense’s strengths are clearly the draws that led Schneider and Macdonald to hire him.
The Hawks were 25th in pass blocking and 17th in run blocking in 2023, and Grubb obviously is being counted on to use his offensive line acumen to improve that unit (Schneider needs to restock the interior for him first).
Grubb and O-line coach Scott Huff (also reportedly coming to Seattle) developed two linemen at UW into 2024 NFL draft prospects, including expected first-rounder Troy Fautanu (who would fill a big need in Seattle).
Grubb is known for going with the strength of his personnel. At earlier college stops, he had powerful ground games. At UW, he utilized Michael Penix Jr. and great receivers to forge an explosive passing game.
As Macdonald said recently, “You’re trying to create situations for your players to have success. So how do you do that? Well, you ask them to do things that they do well. So you have to identify what they do well. … And that’s where you go from.”
On Seattle Sports 710, Brock Huard said he thinks “this is an ‘A’ move for Mike Macdonald, most importantly because it fits philosophically what he wants to do, and that’s play this game and win this game at the line of scrimmage.”
Grubb’s success or failure will come down to whether he can maximize his players. The biggest challenge for most play callers – certainly for Seattle’s last few – has been adjusting within games to what defenses are stopping. Grubb and company faced an NFL-style defense – one put together by Macdonald, in fact – in the title game against Michigan, and they had major trouble against it. Grubb will need to show he can adjust when his script fails.
“We’re going to have answers,” Macdonald said when he was hired. “We’re going to be a physical football team. We’re going to have answers. We’re going to try to be explosive and really build it around the players that we have.”
It won’t be a shock if Grubb ultimately doesn’t have the answers, but Macdonald is “chasing edges” and betting he and Grubb will pull off what Quinn and Sarkisian (and a few others who have tried this) could not.
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