Mike Macdonald’s Seahawks are 4-4 largely because the defense has been struggling with the same issues that plagued Pete Carroll’s unit over the past few years: poor tackling and terrible run defense.

It has led to a lot of speculation about why Macdonald has not yet fixed the problems he was expected to resolve by this point in his first season.

This week, we got some answers and Macdonald explained how he is going to try to finally fix these chronic flaws that have carried over from one coaching program to another. If he does what he says he is going to do, the defenders should be able to play faster and more aggressively, ideally helping them cause havoc and create turnovers.

Leonard Williams explained the probable causes of the failures so far. One was simply players trying to do more than they should, thus leaving big holes in their assigned areas of defense.

Macdonald basically foreshadowed that problem not long after he was hired in January: “It’s team football. You have to be able to play together. There can’t be independent contracting out there. You have to teach them how it fits and why. … When it’s disjointed and there’s independent contracting, you have no chance.”

That has proven true through a 4-4 start in which the Hawks have gotten gashed on the ground over and over again.

DC Aden Durde said this week: “You can’t push plays. You can’t make a play outside the system that is not yours to make. … When you are a young defense and you’re in our situation, you’ve got to trust the system. You’ve got to trust and understand your fundamentals and technique. They get you to the ball.

“You have to stay the course.”

But first you have to agree on what the course is. And that seems to be a big part of the problem as well.

Williams explained it: “I think this defense does require a lot more communication than others who would just say, ‘This is the call; get in it.’ We have like two or three calls in one that can change depending on what the offense is giving us. I think that requires a lot more discipline and communication amongst the players, especially in Lumen Field when it’s loud out there. We have to figure out nonverbal ways of communication.”

That meshes with what Baltimore Pro Bowl safety Kyle Hamilton said about Macdonald’s system after Seattle hired Hamilton’s DC away from the Ravens.

“It’s a challenging system. It makes you grow up really fast,” Hamilton said. “He puts a lot on your plate. It’s up to you to do everything that he puts within the defense. It makes you a great player if you can get a grasp of everything. Put everybody in the right spots to go make plays. … He challenges us, but you’ll be better for it in the end.”

Well, the Seahawks clearly have not been able to grasp everything as a unit yet, which is why Macdonald seems prepared to scale it back a bit.

“I think you’ve gotta start making some decisions on where to narrow it down,” he told Seattle Sports 710 this week. “You can’t focus on everything. So taking out the stuff that we feel like is kind of sunk costs at this point, maybe trying to trim that and then really focusing on and honing in on the stuff that we want to go excel at. That’s stuff that I feel like may be opportunities that we haven’t been able to take advantage of at this point. And stuff that we do feel like we’re doing well, we can try to build on that a little.”

With Matthew Stafford, Cooper Kupp and the Rams coming to Seattle this weekend, now is the perfect time to “narrow” and “trim.”

Remember, most of these defenders have not played together for very long at all. Tre Brown is the tenured “old man” of the unit, in his fourth year in Seattle. Boye Mafe, Riq Woolen and Coby Bryant were drafted in 2022. Jarran Reed returned in 2023, when the Hawks drafted Devon Witherspoon and Derick Hall and also signed Dre Jones and Julian Love. Leonard Williams joined via trade last season. First-rounder Byron Murphy and four vets are new this year – and that includes recent trade pickups Roy Robertson-Harris and Ernest Jones IV.

There is a lot of talent on that defense – very similar to the early Legion of Boom, which was built from 2011 to 2013. They just need to play together.

Injuries have made it hard for that to happen. The biggest blow has been missing Uchenna Nwosu for almost the entire season. Rayshawn Jenkins and Artie Burns also are on IR. Murphy missed three games; Mafe, Woolen and Jerome Baker missed two (Baker later traded for Jones IV).  Williams and Brown missed one each.

Other than the IR guys, they are mostly healthy at the moment. Now they just need to play together for a few games so they can learn all about each other.

As Macdonald said, “We’re just not connecting right now.”

But that is because they seem to be getting their wires crossed. Let them play without having to think so much. Let them feed off each other naturally. And then start adding the layers of complexity back to the defense when they seem ready to take the next step.

“The puzzle pieces just haven’t come together, and a lot of that is my responsibility as a coach,” Macdonald said. “We’ll just keep chasing it until it comes to life. And when it does, it will be a lot of fun.”