Seahawks fans have good reason to give thanks for Seattle hiring Mike Macdonald

As the 2024 season enters the final stretch, the Seattle Seahawks' hiring of Mike Macdonald is looking like a wise move. Just a few weeks ago, that was not the case. That’s how fickle life is for an NFL head coach. That’s how much two games can swing a season, and perhaps an entire career.

Macdonald was a 36-year-old with zero head coaching experience when John Schneider tapped him to become the Seahawks' ninth head man. He replaced Peter Carroll, who coached and won more games for the franchise than anyone else. And at the two-thirds mark of his rookie campaign, Macdonald has already moved into seventh place on the wins list, passing Jim Mora and Mike McCormack, who served as an interim fill-in the strike-shortened 1982 season.

By one fundamental stat, Macdonald’s brief tenure in Seattle has not been especially laudatory. Out of the eight new head coaches hired for the 2024 season (a number which includes Las Vegas’ Antonio Pierce, who had been the Raiders interim coach at the end of the 2023 season) Macdonald is the only one who has coached his team to the exact same record they had at this point last year. Five of the other new coaches have improved on their team’s win total. So by that stat alone, Macdonald's success would appear to be iffy.

Mike Macdonald appears to have been the right choice for the Seattle Seahawks

But you can make stats say anything you want, especially with small sample sizes and selective analysis. For instance, Macdonald is the only new hire in 2024 whose team had a winning record at this point last year. Indeed, Pete Carroll was the only coach fired last off-season despite posting a winning record in 2023.

Therefore, in order to simply match what his predecessor had accomplished, Macdonald would have to post a winning record, and thus be in the upper half of all NFL coaches. And even though the record is the same through 11 games, Macdonald has his team in first place in the NFC West. At this point last season, Seattle trailed the San Francisco 49ers by two games.

The new coaches who have engineered the biggest turnarounds thus far in 2024 are both veterans. Jim Harbaugh (Chargers) and Dan Quinn (Commanders) have their teams three games ahead of where they were last season. Raheem Morris, another veteran coach who has presided over a one-game improvement in Atlanta, was interviewed by the Hawks in the offseason. Quinn was as well.

We can’t know how either veteran would have done in Seattle, and it would have been fascinating to see Quinn return as the top man. But we can at least point out that both Quinn and Morris are having success in their new cities at least partly based on new quarterbacks. For a new coach, who is typically taking over a team with lots of problems, having Jayden Daniels or Kirk Cousins fall into your lap is a godsend. I don’t mean to dismiss what either man has done this year but had either come to Seattle, he would not have had a new quarterback to pump life into the team.

MacDonald, along with Morris, Quinn, and Harbaugh, are the four new coaches who have winning records at the Thanksgiving mark. The other new coaches are a combined 11-34. I happen to think the job Dave Canales is doing in Carolina is a minor miracle. He has already surpassed last year’s win total, and his team is playing competitive football despite a lack of talent and a recent history of failure. He is this year’s Jonathan Gannon, who continued developing his Arizona Cardinal team last year and has them fighting for a playoff spot in 2024.

Records aren’t the only way to evaluate the job a coach is doing. Mike Macdonald passed a major test when the Hawks returned from their bye and won two tough division games against San Francisco and Arizona. He still has problems, especially on the offensive line, but he appears to have taken major steps forward with the defense, which is his area of expertise.

Only two new coaches won this past week (or in the case of Morris’ Falcons, who were on a bye, last week): MacDonald and Tennessee’s Brian Callahan. Macdonald is the only new coach who has won his last two games. Macdonald has his team playing their best football when the games are most meaningful.

And, lest we forget, let’s check in on the men Seattle passed on in order to hire Macdonald. We have already mentioned Quinn and Morris. Among the other names who were high on their list – who they interviewed at least once - offensive gurus Ben Johnson and Bobby Slowik chose to remain with their 2023 teams.

Johnson will have his pick of any top spot for 2025 if he chooses to leave Detroit. Slowik has seen his Houston Texan offense sputter in season two of QB C.J. Stroud, in part due to major injuries to his receivers. It is hard to judge how either would have fared in Seattle, but neither appears to have been realistic hires in hindsight.

Three other top assistants had second interviews. Patrick Graham and Ejiro Evero are currently presiding over two of the worst defenses in the entire league in Las Vegas and Carolina respectively. And Mike Kafka, the assistant head coach and offensive coordinator with the New York Giants is running an offense that has scored the fewest points of any team in the league this year. They have just released their supposed franchise quarterback.

Graham, Evero, and Kafka may all become outstanding head coaches one day, but all three have seen their short-range prospects take a step backward based on how this year has progressed. Mike Macdonald may have looked overmatched as his team lost five out of six games early on. But he has weathered that storm.

He is 37 years old and seems to be figuring out how to coach in the NFL. Obviously there is a lot of work left to be done, but at Thanksgiving, Seahawks fans should be happy that they got themselves a pretty good coach – who might get a lot better if he has the time to grow.

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