Category Archives: Coaches

Coaches, Week 15: Green Bay

Debacle vs. Packers shows once and for all Grubb is not cut out for the NFL

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Apparently, it was too much to ask of Ryan Grubb to build off his first successful game in weeks.

Coming off a dominant 30-point outing against Arizona that featured a season-high 176 yards rushing, the big question was whether Grubb could keep it going. He had four more games to prove he was good enough to remain the Seahawks’ offensive coordinator after this season. But it took only one to answer that question.

The 30-13 debacle in a huge game against the Packers lands mostly on Grubb’s shoulders as the Hawks continued to regress on his side of the ball.

It is really hard to see Mike Macdonald being OK with Grubb as his OC in 2025. With the offense struggling for most of the past two months, we now have the same feeling about Grubb that we had about Pete Carroll in the final two months of last season: It will not get better without a big change.

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Coaches, X's & O's

If Grubb can’t turn offense around, will he be one & done?

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When Mike Macdonald hired Ryan Grubb to be his offensive coordinator back in February, we looked back through modern NFL history to find success stories from guys who had made the jump from college coordinator to NFL play caller. There were few to find.

In fact, a notable failure involved another former Husky, Steve Sarkisian, who joined Dan Quinn in Atlanta and promptly took that once vaunted offense backward.

We wrote then:

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. … It won’t be a shock if Grubb ultimately doesn’t have the answers.”

Well, Grubb has not proven to have the answers in his rookie season. And, if his unit continues to fail, it would not be a surprise if Macdonald followed Pete Carroll’s path and fired his OC after his first year as Seattle’s coach.

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Coaches, Week 11: At San Francisco

Win vs. 49ers pauses deserved criticisms — Can Hawks end them for good?

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John Schneider, Mike Macdonald and Geno Smith had been under fire for several weeks – dating back to the bad loss to the Giants that dropped the Seahawks to 3-2.

Since then, they had fallen to 4-5 – with the defense getting gashed game after game and Smith and the offense making tons of self-defeating mistakes.

The reputations of Schneider, Macdonald and Smith were waning along with their season as they prepared to play the 49ers, who had beaten them six straight times (counting playoffs). But Macdonald’s recalibrated defense and Smith’s rediscovered comeback mojo gave the desperate Hawks a much-needed 20-17 upset win, putting the Seahawks back in the NFC West race.

Back at .500 with a streak-busting win, the Hawks now need to take that confidence into a battle for first place against Arizona in Week 12.

The question is whether this big win over the 49ers foretells more big wins to come in a season that still presents a lot of tough challenges – the ninth-toughest remaining slate.

Let’s look at the role of each of the three central figures in how this team sank to 4-5 and then finally beat the 49ers.

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Coaches, X's & O's

Time to stop the ‘independent contracting’ on defense

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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.

More on Hawkszone rundown podcast


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.

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Coaches, State of the team

Players: Macdonald and ‘right coaches’ bring ‘urgency’

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Amid the hullabaloo by some overly nostalgic fans about Mike Macdonald’s rearranging of the VMAC, his players seem to get it. They know Pete Carroll’s missing hoop and the temporarily blank walls are a metaphor for a clean slate, a new beginning.

They also know the expectations are much higher now and being delivered in a more defined, exacting way than Carroll and his staff were doing over the last few years.

It’s all as it should be, and the smart ones – players and fans – understand that. The players who don’t won’t be around very long. And that’s as it should be, too.

The core leaders of this defense – Leonard Williams, Uchenna Nwosu and Julian Love – sound bought in.

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Coaches, Free agency, The roster

Macdonald: ‘We want to set the standard in Seattle’

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In Pete Carroll’s last
season in Seattle, his
platitudes and vague
descriptors about what needed to be fixed on the defense had worn super thin and it was so obvious that he really had no idea how he was going to fix the weakest part of his team after years of failing.

That’s why it is so refreshing to hear Mike Macdonald
quietly but confidently talk about how elite his defense is going to be. He outlines it so clearly that you can just see it happening — and not taking long either.

Whether he is talking about how expectations lead to Super Bowl wins, about his motto of Chasing Edges or about “building a wall up the middle” of his defense, he sounds assured that all of these things will happen.

His resume supports his words, which is why he evokes such confidence from so much of the fan base – a huge turnaround from the last couple years of the fading Carroll era.

Here are some of the encouraging things Macdonald said at the NFL owners meetings in Orlando this week, as reported by Michael-Shawn Dugar of The Athletic and John Boyle of Seahawks.com.

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Coaches

Hawks are following Dan Quinn’s hiring trends; will it work for them?

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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.

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Coaches

Mike Macdonald: ‘We’re gonna win a lot of football games’

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“We’re gonna be here for a long time, and we’re gonna win a lot of football games.” — Mike Macdonald to execs and staff welcoming him at VMAC

When it came down to conference title game weekend, John Schneider was pretty much guaranteed of getting one of his top two options to become the Seahawks’ next coach.

When Ben Johnson decided to stay in Detroit, Baltimore defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald immediately became the favorite – even though he had yet to speak with Schneider. It happened fast: Two interviews in two days yielded a six-year contract to become the eighth full-time coach in Seahawks history.

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Coaches

Schneider’s top choice for coach is probably still in the playoffs

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The Seahawks are now one of just two teams left without coaches for 2024, and some fans and analysts are wondering what is taking so long.

First, they need to understand the NFL rules around hiring a coach: Conference title game coaches could not interview this week, and teams have to interview at least two minority candidates in person as part of their process.

The Hawks have two minority candidates remaining. Las Vegas DC Patrick Graham reportedly met with John Schneider on Tuesday, and Carolina DC Ejiro Evero was set to interview with Schneider today.

Meanwhile, it seems pretty clear that Schneider still wants to talk to at least one coach from the four remaining playoff teams. Detroit offensive coordinator Ben Johnson is the obvious one, and Baltimore DC Mike Macdonald could be on Seattle’s radar as well.

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Coaches

Young offensive coach coming to boost ‘stagnant’ Hawks?

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“If you’re stagnant in this league, you’re behind.” – John Schneider

John Schneider thought the Seahawks had gotten “stagnant” under Pete Carroll and he clearly is looking for an innovative coach who is on the cutting edge of today’s NFL. That leads us to believe he wants a young offensive mind in charge, as so many successful teams have acquired in recent years.

Five of the last six Super Bowls have been won by teams led by former offensive coordinators: Andy Reid (twice), Sean McVay, Bruce Arians, Doug Pederson.

Young OCs turned coaches have led their teams to the Super Bowl and lost: Zac Taylor in Cincinnati, Nick Sirianni in Philadelphia, Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco.

Schneider sure seems to want a guy like that.

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