We still don’t know who Mike Macdonald will hire to replace Klint Kubiak as the Seattle Seahawks' offensive coordinator, but recent history makes one thing very clear. It will probably be an internal hire.
That is not a slam dunk, and Macdonald will have to be comfortable with someone like Jake Peetz or Justin Outten, both of whom have drawn a lot of speculation. Andrew Janocko would also be a serious candidate if he did not follow Klint Kubiak to Las Vegas.
There are two potent explanations for why a Super Bowl-winning team would promote from within, and both would appear to be in play for the Seahawks. If you’re looking for historical precedent, you might be surprised at how little there is, at least in the recent past. Still, the few examples we have make the likelihood of an internal promotion highly likely.
Where will Mike Macdonald look for his new Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator?
In the last decade, this situation has only happened four times. Four defending Super Bowl champions are faced with replacing their offensive coordinator. Oddly, there have been no situations in which the Lombardi Trophy winner had to replace their defensive coordinator, which may be an indication of the overall preference for offensive-minded coaches.
This does not mean that a lot of coordinators do not use Super Bowl success to propel them to the head coaching ranks. It happens all the time. It just doesn’t necessarily happen immediately on the heels of the Super Bowl win, as is the case with Seattle and Kubiak.
There is a practical reason for this. The Las Vegas Raiders were willing to wait for Kubiak. Not many teams are thus inclined. Waiting to hire a new head coach until after the Super Bowl can put an entire organization at a disadvantage. The assistant coaching staff pool has dried up. The preparation for free agency and the draft is behind schedule.
These issues are not deal breakers if a franchise really wants a particular coach, and that appears to have been the case with Kubiak and the Raiders.
It is actually a bit more common for an ascendant coordinator to get his head coaching shot a year or two after his Super Bowl run. Assuming his team continues to perform well – but perhaps not quite good enough to reach the Super Bowl – the timeline puts him in a good position. He has a positive rep from his recent success and is available much earlier in the hiring cycle.
Perhaps that explains the surprisingly small number of times a Kubiak-like situation has occurred recently. When it did come up – when a head coach had to replace his offensive coordinator after winning the Super Bowl – here’s what happened.
In 2018, the Eagles promoted Mike Groh from wide receivers coach to OC after Frank Reich left to take the top spot in Indianapolis.
In 2023, when OC Eric Bieniemy left KC for a play-calling role in Washington, Andy Reid promoted Matt Nagy from his role as senior assistant and QB coach.
Last year, Nick Sirianni elevated Kevin Patullo from pass game coordinator/associate head coach to OC after Kellen Moore departed for New Orleans.
All three were internal hires. The only time a team did not make an internal hire was when the Rams’ Sean McVay hired Liam Coen to replace Kevin O’Connell in 2022. However, it is worth noting that Coen had been with McVay and the Rams from 2018-2020 before spending one year as OC at the University of Kentucky.
In other words, though not technically an internal hire, it was about as close as you could get.
There are two obvious reasons why this happens, and why it is likely to happen again for the Seahawks this year. First, if it ain’t broke… Obviously, an internal hire is the best way to preserve continuity for a team that just won the championship.
Second, the timeline seriously favors an internal hire. Almost all of the high-end external candidates have been snapped up by early February.
There is one little wrinkle to the Seahawks situation that may come into play. The four head coaches who have hired a new OC after winning the Super Bowl over the past decade – Doug Pederson, Sean McVay, Andy Reid, Nick Sirianni – all come from the offensive side of the ball. Mike Macdonald does not.
Macdonald will not be calling offensive plays, as Reid and McVay have done. Could that influence him to look for an OC with more experience than Peetz, Outten, or Janocko? That’s what he did last year when he hired Kubiak.
But there does not appear to be a Klint Kubiak floating around out there. Or does there?
If Macdonald wants to look outside, he might try to lure Klint’s brother Klay away from his OC role with Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco. The inducement for a lateral move would be the opportunity to call plays.
But I don’t really see that happening. I tend to favor historical trends, and there’s a pretty strong one suggesting that Seattle’s next OC is already on the coaching staff.