Mike Macdonald might not know if he can save the Seahawks' season

In 1981, a coach who would one day wind up in Canton thought he was about to be fired. Joe Gibbs had never been a head coach at any level of football when Jack Kent Cooke hired him to assume leadership of the team now known as the Washington Commanders. Gibbs had been coaching in the NFL for eight years at that point.

Half of those years had been at the coordinator level. He was considered a young offensive wizard who had studied at the feet of Don Coryell. With Gibbs as his coordinator, Coryell had turned the San Diego Chargers into “Air Coryell,” one of the prototypes for what modern passing offenses would become.

But things weren’t going well that first season in Washington. Gibbs’ team started 0-5, and when Cooke called him into a meeting after the week five loss, Gibbs thought he might be getting the axe. Instead, Cooke expressed full support and essentially told Gibbs to fix the problem. With that vote of confidence, Joe Gibbs went on to win three Super Bowls over the next decade.

Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald might not be ready to win until year two

The similarities between Joe Gibbs and Seattle Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald are striking. Perhaps not in terms of their personalities or philosophies, but they found themselves in virtually identical situations, some forty years apart. Like Gibbs, Macdonald’s first time as a head coach came at the NFL level. Like Gibbs, the job required him to travel a long way from where he was comfortable.

Gibbs was primarily a West Coast kid who came to Washington. Macdonald spent most of his life on the East Coast before taking the job in Seattle. Both struggled early on with the side of the ball, which was their supposed strength.

Mike Macdonald coached outstanding defenses under John Harbaugh in Baltimore. The roster he inherited from Pete Carroll required a lot of attention on the defensive side of the ball, but the cupboard wasn’t exactly bare. There was solid talent at several key positions. Through free agency and the draft, John Schneider addressed some of the other holes in the off-season. It would fall to Macdonald and his coaches to figure out how to put it all together and develop depth.

The results, early on, looked promising. But at the six-week mark, some are beginning to wonder whether the early-season success was achieved with more than a little smoke and mirrors. Those first three opponents – Denver, New England, and Miami – are among the least productive offenses in the league. The Pats and Broncos are currently the second and third-worst offenses. The Hawks played the Dolphins after they had lost Tua Tagovailoa. Without him, the Dolphins are a bottom-five offense as well.

Once Macdonald’s squad had to take on a top-tier offense, they surrendered 42 points. Since that decisive loss in Detroit week four, Seattle’s defense has been dreadful. They have given up an average of 36 points over the last three games. All three of those teams have posted their highest point totals of the season against Mike Macdonald’s defense.

They haven’t been able to stop elite offenses like the Lions and 49ers. They haven’t even been able to stop weak offenses like the Giants. In hindsight, perhaps alarm bells should have been ringing when the woeful Patriots managed to score 20 in week two. That is the Pats’ highest point total of the season. If you’re following along with the math, that means that the Seattle defense has allowed four of its six opponents to record their highest point total of the season thus far.

That obviously cannot last.

Back in 1981, Joe Gibbs, like most new head coaches, revamped his staff when he took over. He brought assistants with whom he had a good working relationship.

He had an assistant head coach with five years of experience in the NFL. He had an offensive coordinator with six years of experience. His defensive coordinator only had three years of NFL coaching experience, but they had come in Washington, so he was able to provide some continuity. His special teams coach (they weren’t called coordinators back then) also only had a couple of years of NFL experience, but they had come with Gibbs in San Diego. That was his upper-level staff. They were all young, but every one of them had NFL coaching experience.

Mike Macdonald did not do that when assembling his staff. His OC, Ryan Grubb, had never coached in the NFL. Jay Harbaugh spent a few seasons as an entry-level assistant in the NFL before moving to the college ranks. When he took over the Seahawks’ special teams, he had never even been an assistant position coach in the NFL.

Against the 49ers, the offense continued to struggle with rhythm and consistency. After the inexplicable abandonment of the running game against New York, Grubb tried to establish it on Thursday night. He called running plays on nine of the first 18 plays. They weren’t very successful, but they actually were better than the early passing game, which resulted mostly in incompletions and interceptions. Once the Hawks fell behind, Grubb stopped running altogether.

He continued to try and get the ball to his talented collection of wideouts, despite a very low success rate. Geno Smith completed every single pass targeted at tight ends or running backs. He went 16 for 16. In passes targeting his wide receivers, he complete fewer than 44 percent of his throws. DK Metcalf was targeted 11 times. He caught three balls. It seems apparent that at least for now, Macdonald and Grubb do not know how to get the best of their best receiver.

Is this due to X’s and O’s, or is it due to player management? Probably both.

All we can say for sure is that Mike Macdonald has never coached an NFL receiver. Neither has Ryan Grubb. Frisman Jackson, the position coach, has good NFL experience but not with Metcalf or the Seahawks. He was one of the new coaches Macdonald brought in. Somehow, these coaches have to figure out how to course-correct before the season slips away.

It would be nice to believe that Harbaugh’s underperforming special teams unit is showing signs of life with the Laviska Shenault touchdown return against San Francisco. If I am going to criticize Harbaugh for poor special teams play, I have to give him credit when they perform.

But again, we can’t be seduced by that one play. Shenault fumbled an earlier return which put the Hawks in an early hole. And even if you don’t feel it’s fair to pin a fumble on the coaches, remember that Dee Williams botched the second kickoff return of the game and wound up pinning Geno Smith’s offense on the 10-yard line.

Oh, and there was that punt that should have been ruled a muff and given the ball to San Francisco. Faulty replay procedure saved Harbaugh’s unit from another major blunder.

The oddest thing about the coaching staff through six games is that the defense, which appears to be in free fall right now, is the one area where they have plenty of NFL experience. Macdonald has Leslie Frazier, a former head coach and long-time defensive coordinator, serving as assistant head coach. Defensive coordinator Aden Durde is the only coordinator who has recent NFL coaching experience. So if the fresh, new coaches aren't succeeding and the older, more experienced coaches aren't succeeding, what do you do?

In 1981, the most important thing Joe Gibbs did to save his team and his job was to throw out all his preconceptions and build from the ground up with what he had in hand. Gibbs tried to import Air Coryell, but he didn’t have the roster to do it. What he had was a bruising offensive line and a big power runner in John Riggins.

He threw out his downfield passing attack. He inserted a second tight end. He simplified the offense. They ran counters right and left. They disguised the plays by running them from different sets and using different motion concepts, but there were only a handful of actual plays. The multiple formations prevented opposing defenses from keying on anything. They knew Riggins would be getting the ball. They just didn’t know if he’d be going right or left. Joe Gibbs rode that new offense to the Super Bowl in his second season.

Mike Macdonald has to do something similar. What worked in Baltimore may not work in Seattle. Maybe he needs to cede defensive play-calling. Maybe he needs to instruct Ryan Grubb to accept that downfield passing to the wideouts won’t work until the offense shores up its pass protection.

Maybe Macdonald needs to understand that he and his handpicked top lieutenants have not done this before and that perhaps he needs some help, either from the more experienced coaches already in-house or from the outside.

Does anyone have Robert Saleh’s email address?

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