Who is Mike Macdonald? Let’s let the young, new coach of this new Seahawks era explain
His lightweight hoodie and black boots under his dark-blue sports coat — 30-something chic — said it for him.
Yet Mike Macdonald made it clear anyway: He’s absolutely not Pete Carroll, the NFL’s oldest head coach until three weeks ago in Seattle.
He’s 36. He’s “juiced” to be leading the Seahawks. He’s the NFL’s youngest head coach. He’s not going to be his legendary predecessor he’s never met.
“Pete has a great personality. But it’s his, and it’s authentic to who he is as a person. I have a different personality,” Macdonald said Thursday in his first public comments a day after signing a six-year contract to be the ninth coach in Seahawks history.
“You’ll get to know me. But my plan is to be myself every day,” Macdonald said. “And you will just get me. It’s not a facade...It’s all about what’s the best interest for the team, what’s the best interest for the players and how we can be successful.
“There’s a sense of humor in there, I promise,” Macdonald said, drawing a laugh from Stephanie, his wife of two-plus years, seated in the front row of the packed main auditorium inside the Virginia Mason Athletic Center. “Some people like it more than others. But it will come out.”
So why is Macdonald taking what he and Schneider both called “a leap of faith” leaving Baltimore and their East Coast family roots to begin a new Seahawks era?
“He’s a special dude,” Schneider said.
“This is the future right here,” the GM said, turning to Macdonald seated to his left. “This is where it’s going.”
Schneider said Macdonald can and should “change the marketplace” in NFL head coaching.
“He’s a disruptor.,” Schneider said. “He’s changed it.”
What is the former coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens’ top-ranked defense going to do to get the Seahawks past Super Bowl-bound (again) San Francisco in the NFC West and back to championships that have eluded Seattle for the last 10 years?
Mike Macdonald’s roots
He was born in the Boston area then moved to the Atlanta suburbs when he was 6. That was after his father, Hugh, had his job move him. Dad had a career in business.
He went to high school in Roswell, Georgia, then college at his home state University of Georgia.
His heroes?
They aren’t John and Jim Harbaugh, who gave Macdonald his first NFL and college defensive coordinator jobs the last three years that led him here to Seahawks headquarters Thursday.
It isn’t necessarily his wife of two-plus years, Stephanie, though he obviously adores and cherishes her. A former NFL cheerleader for three teams, including Macdonald’s former Ravens, she was seated in the front row of the main auditorium as her husband spoke Thursday.
“You’ll get to know her, and this city will fall in love with her,” Macdonald said. “She is an absolute rock star and a saint of a human.”
His heroes aren’t necessarily his parents. Yet he glowed when talking about his mother, who “has taught me if you’re going to do something, you’d better do it right” and his father Hugh for teaching him “integrity, humility and determination” will always pay off in life.
“My two heroes are my two older sisters Maggie and Kate,” Macdonald said. “Kate actually has lived here in this city for quite a while. She lives in Texas now, but I’ve been following their example my whole life, and they’re pretty incredible people.
“Thank you.”
Kate’s husband Chris is from Renton. From near the Seahawks’ facility that is Macdonald’s new workplace, in fact. Macdonald and his wife have visited his sister’s family here in football offseasons and gone to Sounders and Mariners games.
“They’re just incredibly courageous people, have had just a great effect on me,” Macdonald said of his sisters. “They’re older than me. They’re four and six years older than I am. And anyone with older siblings, you’re always looking up to them and how they do things.
“Talk about people that have taken leaps of faith throughout their careers and with their families and who they are as people, it was just easy. You’re just chasing them. I love them. They’re pretty awesome.”
How he got into coaching
Macdonald readily downplays his athletic prowess. His playing days in football — he was a linebacker and a running back — and in baseball ended with his career at Centennial High School in the Atlanta suburb of Roswell. He does still like to golf, though NFL coaching doesn’t afford him a ton of time for that. He’ll have even less time for golf now as a first-time head coach.
Macdonald’s coach his senior year at Centennial High School was Xarvia Smith. A couple years later, when Macdonald was in college attending the University of Georgia, Smith got the head coaching job at Cedar Shoals High School. Cedar Shoals was in Athens, near the UGA campus. Macdonald called his high school coach and asked if he’d hire him to coach. Smith, remembering how smart he felt Macdonald was, easily agreed.
That’s how Macdonald coached Cedar Shoals High’s linebackers and running backs, a 21-year old coaching 17- and 18-year olds.
He coached high school football while finishing his bachelor’s degree. He earned a 3.99 grade-point average, graduating summa cum laude with honors in business administration and finance at Georgia.
“It just started when I coached high school football at Cedar Shoals and had an affinity for the linebacker position,” Macdonald said Thursday, “and it went from there.”
Well, he made it go from there.
Nearly every week in those two years coaching at Cedar Shoals as an undergraduate, Macdonald stopped by uninvited to Georgia’s football facility, Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall, on the UGA campus. He talked to any UGA coach who would bother to talk to him. Not many did.
Just before he graduated, in 2010, he by chance ran into the Bulldogs coach he really wanted to connect with, Georgia defensive coordinator Todd Grantham. They were at a Starbucks in Athens just before one of Macdonald’s 8 a.m. classes at UGA. Grantham had just been hired from the Dallas Cowboys’ staff by then-Georgia coach Mark Richt. Macdonald had sent Grantham a binder full of material that displayed how immersed the college student was in coaching football. He’d never gotten a response — until that day in Starbucks.
Macdonald asked for any job. Grantham invited Macdonald to volunteer on Georgia’s football staff, but only if he got into graduate school at UGA first. It was spring. Admissions deadlines had already passed for Georgia’s master’s programs, including in sports administration and policy.
So what, thought Macdonald. The precocious college student/high school football coach talked his way in to grad school — and onto the Bulldogs’ staff as a volunteer intern.
The next year he became a graduate assistant, when other GAs from the previous season left Georgia to get (startlingly low-)paying coaching jobs. By 2011, he became a quality-control coach on defense for the Bulldogs.
In 2014, John Harbaugh made him a coaching intern with the Ravens. Macdonald, at age 26, was in the NFL.
Schneider marvels at how Macdonald has learned from each coach he asks.
“Mike is networking learner, not a climbing networker,” Seattle’s GM said. “There’s a huge difference.”
After two years as a defensive assistant in Baltimore and four years as a position coach on defense, John’s brother Jim Harbaugh made Macdonald a first-time defensive coordinator, at Michigan for the 2021 season. That Wolverines team went from 106th nationally in defensive efficiency the year before to 13th. Michigan won the Big Ten Conference for the first time in 17 years and went to the College Football Playoff.
A year later, John Harbaugh got Macdonald back from his younger brother, to Baltimore to be the Ravens’ defensive coordinator. That was for the 2022 season.
This past season, Macdonald’s Ravens became the first NFL defense to lead the league in sacks, turnovers and fewest points allowed in one regular season. They dominated Brock Purdy and the Super Bowl-bound 49ers in a Baltimore win at San Francisco on Christmas night. The Ravens (13-4) had the best record in the AFC. They lost last weekend in the conference title game to Patrick Mahomes and Kansas City, 17-10. Macdonald’s disguised, confusing defense held Mahomes and the Chiefs scoreless and below 100 yards in the second half.
The Harbaughs gave Macdonald his blueprint for head coaching.
“Those guys are some of the most authentic, competitive people I’ve ever been around,” Macdonald said. “And the players know when it’s real, and they love their players, and they have their players’ backs, and they’re willing to do whatever it takes, put them in position to succeed. Sometimes it’s tough love, but it’s telling them the truth, being respectful.”
It’s how Macdonald says he will be with his Seahawks players. And, yes, he made it clear Thursday he will be calling Seattle’s defensive plays as head coach.
“It is a leap of faith,” he said of leaving Baltimore, “but this is a special city. This is a great football city, man, and we’ve got the best fans in the world.
“I understand where this organization wants to go, and I feel like we’re aligned on how we want to get there. I’m just juiced to go do it.
“There’s going to be no secrets, secret thing of scheme or secret plays that are going to get us there faster. It’s going to take a lot of hard work by finding the right people and doing it the right way, treating people the right way, building everybody up throughout the building.”
To his new Seahawks players, whom he’s yet to meet?
“I can guarantee you this: You will get everything out of myself and our coaching staff every day,” he said, addressing them via Thursday’s press conference. “We will not stop until we want to get to where we get. I hope that’s very clear to you.
“You’re the first thing that goes through our mind when we make decisions. That’s the only way to do it. That’s the only way to win.”
This story was originally published February 1, 2024 at 5:10 PM.
