This time, Seahawks coaches will be at NFL combine. Who, what they and GM will be seeking
This Seahawks combine will be more of a combined effort.
Seattle’s scouts and personnel men will again be in Indianapolis for the NFL’s annual scouting extravaganza this coming week. For this first time under Mike Macdonald, so will the coaches.
This time last year, before and during the 2024 event, Macdonald was immersed in everything BUT the combine.
The former Baltimore Ravens defensive coordinator had been hired by the Seahawks to replace Pete Carroll just weeks earlier. In February 2024 Macdonald was in the process of hiring 16 of his 22 new assistant coaches. It was the 37-year old’s rookie year as a head coach.
Twelve months ago, Macdonald and general manager John Schneider were split, physically, across the country. The GM and his personnel side of the franchise flew to Indiana for a week of testing, interviews and drills with top college prospects for the upcoming draft.
Macdonald and his new coaching staff stayed in the Seattle area, at team headquarters in Renton.
During the 2024 combine in Indianapolis they were back installing the Seahawks’ new offensive, defensive and special-teams playbooks. Macdonald and his assistant coaches were designing the new training plans their players began using in April during offseason workouts. The new head coach was even having the previous hallway murals painted over white, part of forging a new Seahawks era.
The coaches watched online, remotely, the players’ combine workouts last year plus the interviews done by Schneider’s personnel men in Indianapolis. Macdonald and his coaches did not have first-hand impressions from last year’s combine. They relied on those from Schneider and his staffers.
Coaches from the division-rival 49ers and Rams haven’t been going to the combine the last couple years. But 2024 was the first time anyone could remember the Seahawks’ coaches not being in Indianapolis.
That’s changing this year.
Macdonald, just-hired new offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak and the Seahawks coaches will be inside the Indiana Convention Center and Lucas Oil Stadium this coming week. They will be in meeting rooms in hotels with Schneider and the scouting/personnel side for the 2025 NFL combine that begins this coming week.
Macdonald has also done something else he didn’t do last offseason toward the draft: He joined Schneider in Mobile, Alabama, late last month for the Senior Bowl week of practices watching college all-stars.
The Senior Bowl and the combine are the latest examples of the most obvious, potentially winning difference between the Seahawks’ 2024 offseason and this one: The coaches are more involved in more scouting, evaluation and (it stands to reason) drafting the players that fit how they want to play.
Put another way: Macdonald and his staff will never be less involved in scouting, evaluating and drafting Seahawks players than they were last year.
“What a difference a year makes, huh?” Macdonald said. “It’s kind of wild.”
At the start of this first full offseason as Seahawks coach, January to July training camp, Macdonald said the question is: “How do we evolve?”
One way is already clearer: His vision of how he wants his Seahawks to play. Specifically, Macdonald enters this combine knowing after coaching them this past season how capable the team’s players are to play to his vision. He knows far more than he did last year at this time which positions need to add new players to fit his vision. That is, physicality on offense AND defense.
“Yeah, I think that’s probably fair,” Macdonald said.
“But I think that transcends our entire football team, the direction we want to go, things we want to emphasize more, how we build the offseason, every decision you’re making, having done it for a year and understanding the people we have in the building and our coaches and players and how everything operates.
“Just having a base layer foundation of understanding is going to be really helpful.”
Positions of draft need
Schneider will answer questions from Seahawks beat reporters Tuesday at the combine in Indianapolis, for the first time since August.
The GM acknowledged this month while talking to the team’s flagship radio station KIRO what you and anyone who has watched a Seahawks game the last few years already know: Seattle needs to improve its offensive line.
Specifically, the Seahawks need to replace one and perhaps both starting guards for 2025. Veteran left guard Laken Tomlinson just turned 33. He wasn’t effective enough in his lone Seattle season last year to be likely to return. The team went through three right guards in 2024. The Seahawks and now-former line coach Scott Huff benched 2023 draft pick Anthony Bradford. They passed over 2024 pick Christian Haynes after giving him multiple chances to start. They eventually settled on starting rookie sixth-rounder Sataoa Laumea for final month and a half of last season.
Schneider said at last year’s combine guards are overdrafted and overpaid, based on their relative talent. He said that in the context of the Seahawks watching their 2023 starting guard Damien Lewis leave to sign a $53 million contract with $26.2 million guaranteed from the Carolina Panthers.
This week on his weekly appearance with the team’s flagship station, Schneider explained himself on guards now that he needs them.
“The philosophy is not that we are not going to overpay (or overdraft). We probably will, because we have to,” the GM told KIRO radio Thursday. “But you have to be smart with those positions, right?
“So what is the difference? Are we going to overpay a guard — and lose out on a defensive tackle?
“Ummm...no.”
Schneider chuckled.
“We’d rather pay the player that we think is a better talent,” he said.
“It’s kind of like drafting for need, right, in the draft, right? Are you going to draft — ‘Oh, you have to draft this player’ and then you go right by (a guy) who is a better player than the offensive linemen...”
Schneider calls it simple NFL capitalism, “supply and demand.”
“It’s never at a level that it’s not important,” said Schneider, who came from Seattle in 2010 as a first-time GM from a dozen years as an personnel executive with Green Bay, Washington and Kansas City. “I did work a guy who said ‘A guard is a guard is a guard,’ and you don’t pay him.
“But that’s not the case with us.
“It is, we have to put a value on people, at the end of the day.”
Then there’s center. If that spot was set with Olu Oluwatimi, the Seahawks wouldn’t have signed free-agent Connor Williams late in the 2024 preseason. It was 8 1/2 months after Williams had reconstructive knee surgery. Williams started the first half of the season. Then he abruptly quit, retiring at age 27. Oluwatimi, a 2023 draft choice, started the latter half of the season. But Haynes was practicing at center, for the first time in his football life, in December into January.
That’s up to 60% of Seattle’s offensive line changing this offseason.
Seattle’s free-agency just got help
League officials surprised some this week when they sent a letter to all teams explaining the 2025 salary cap is about to be lifted from $277 million to $281 million. That’s higher than some expected. It’s thanks to increased revenues from the NFL’s new media-rights and streaming deals.
“Yeah, we’ll take it. We’ll take anything we can get, right?” Schneider said, laughing on KIRO radio.
Schneider said his staff had budgeted for a cap this year of about $2 million less than that $277-281 million. Teams are expecting to learn the exact cap number for 2025 within the next week.
The combine this week is where Schneider and his staff will meet with agents — not just those of the college players entering April’s draft but also with veteran NFL free agents.
Schneider learns talking to representatives in Indianapolis what the contract values free agents Seattle may be targeting are seeking.
The league’s negotiating period with unrestricted free agents begins March 12. The signing period begins the first day of the league year, March 12. That’s when the Seahawks have to be under the salary cap with their top 51 contracts for 2025.
Seattle enters the combine about $6.46 million over the cap, per estimates from overthecap.com. They have decisions to make on the final year of the contracts for quarterback Geno Smith (a scheduled $44.5 million cap charge he almost certainly won’t play with this year) and wide receiver Tyler Lockett.
Lockett, a 10-year veteran, said before and after the team’s final game of this past season Jan. 5 at the Los Angeles Rams he realizes the Seahawks might release him. They would save $17 million in cap space doing that.
This story was originally published February 21, 2025 at 12:41 PM.
