How Seahawks’ full buy-in of voluntary offseason is paying off entering opener
Mike Macdonald feels good enough about his Seahawks to send them away.
One week before the real games begin, Seattle’s players and coaches have three days off for Labor Day weekend. They return Monday afternoon to begin preparing for the opening game against the division-rival San Francisco 49ers Sept. 7 at Lumen Field. “To refresh,” Macdonald said.
The second-year coach who remade his defense last year and his offense this year feels so good about his Seahawks entering the opener, he said this when asked Thursday how his team stacks up to the rest of the NFC West:
“Bro, I really don’t care,” Macdonald said.
He laughed.
“I really don’t care. I just care where we’re at,” he said.
“Not trying to be a ‘choch.’ But, just don’t care.”
No, Macdonald is not being a fake, or a jerk. The 37-year-old first-time head coach truly is too focused on his Seahawks process in his two-year overhaul, and where his players are in it, to care about where the 49ers, Rams and Cardinals may be in a division Seattle hasn’t won since 2020.
Plus, the coach knows he’ll find out more about where San Francisco is soon enough, next weekend. The Cliff Notes version:
- The defending NFC West-champion Rams have a huge injury concern with Matthew Stafford and the 37-year-old franchise QB’s back.
- The 49ers have so many injuries to so many starters, so many changes on defense — plus yet another contract impasse — people in the Bay Area don’t have a firm grasp on how last season’s last-place team will rebound.
- The Cardinals are lurking relatively unnoticed. They have stellar safeties on a young, vastly improved defense that defense-first head coach Jonathan Gannon has successfully rebuilt.
Macdonald says he hasn’t noticed any of that. He’s too focused on what his players are doing in learning and executing Seattle’s defense and new offense for 2025.
“I’m really excited about the process,” he said.
Macdonald took another step in that process Thursday. He announced Seattle’s starters on the unit that is a key to whether the Seahawks get back to the playoffs for the first time in three years: the offensive line.
As expected, as in training-camp practices plus performances in the preseason games showed, the Seahawks’ starting O-line will be: Charles Cross at left tackle; rookie first-round draft choice Grey Zabel at left guard; 2024 undrafted free agent Jalen Sundell at center; Anthony Bradford at right guard and Abe Lucas beginning a contract year at right tackle.
“Good stuff,” Macdonald said.
Yet he and every player knows those five won’t start every one of the 17 games this season. Injuries and performance will change that lineup. It always does.
“As you know, nothing’s set in stone,” Macdonald said. “(But) those guys have done a great job.”
Olu Oluwatimi was the starting center until he injured his back in mid-August. Sundell, last year’s rookie backup tackle, guard and center who was a college teammate of Zabel’s at North Dakota State, dominated the Raiders and Chiefs defenses with blocks on the first, second and third levels into the secondary to win the center job.
The head coach made a point to say Oluwatimi could start and would, if necessary.
“Olu’s done a phenomenal job. He’s ready to go, if anything happens,” Macdonald said.
“But that’s the crew that we’ll start the season with.”
Offseason participation keys Macdonald’s optimism
The reason Macdonald is bullish on how his players have learned the offense and defense and how they’ve internalized his “commander’s intent,” as the son of a West Point graduate puts it, dates to the quiet days of April.
Back when the Mariners’ baseball season was just beginning, hockey’s Kraken were still playing, and real football was still five months away, the Seahawks began voluntary meetings and training at their facility in Renton. May into June they had voluntary organized team activities practices.
Every NFL team every offseason has guys who skip those for various reasons: trusted training on their own, injuries getting rehabilitated elsewhere, weddings, births of children, contract issues, or a status high enough to basically make them exempt until mandatory training camp begins in late July.
Even when they were going at their very best, back-to-back Super Bowl best, the Seahawks of 10 years ago had guys who routinely blew off voluntary OTAs. Michael Bennett missed them; he stayed home with his wife and kids in Hawaii. Bruce Irvin skipped.
Marshawn Lynch? He wasn’t there. Because he couldn’t get fined, of course.
Yet this offseason these Seahawks, at their relative worst coming off back-to-back non-playoff seasons, had 100% participation in OTAs, meetings and training at their facility.
DeMarcus Lawrence, 33 years old, is entering his 12th NFL season. His first 11 years were with with the Dallas Cowboys. The four-time Pro Bowl defensive end has made more than $134 million in his career. He didn’t need to be in Seattle working out and studying film with teammates in April. He was.
Jarran Reed was working on his footwork and hands charging into fellow defensive linemen in voluntary practices this spring. Reed is 32. The Seahawks drafted him three U.S. presidents ago, in 2016.
Leonard Williams, the Seahawks’ $64.5 million, Pro Bowl defensive end at age 30, was at OTAs and minicamps, too. This is his 11th NFL year.
Johnathan Hankins is 33. He has a bad back. He hasn’t practiced since last season. The veteran nose tackle is on the non-football-injury list. The Seahawks don’t know when he’s going to play again. Yet Hankins was in the building, doing what they call “mental reps” in meetings and film studying.
During the offseason, Macdonald, new quarterback Sam Darnold, middle linebacker Ernest Jones and other team leaders said they believed the full buy-in this spring would lead to a better training camp this summer — and a better team this fall into winter.
“We’re bought into the goal and the mission,” Jones said during voluntary OTAs in June. “And the goal is to put another banner up in here. And I think everyone believes in that.
“We’re going to show up to work, and do we have to do to make sure we get it done.”
The TNT asked the defensive signal-caller who won a Super Bowl with the Rams in 2022 if these Seahawks players talked internally about making sure they showed up for the voluntary weeks this spring.
“It wasn’t something that we just sat there and say, ‘Hey, make sure you’re here,’” Jones said. “But if we want to be who we say we’re going to be, if we want to do what we want to do, and as when the best teams I’ve been around, OTAs were really good.
“So I think that’s just a direct reflection of what the work you get in here and what carries you into the season.”
Paying off most on the new offense
This summer the Seahawks offense appeared to have taken to their new system from coordinator Klint Kubiak and new outside-zone blocking scheme from line coach John Benton perhaps better and quicker than the coaches could have expected.
The starting O-line plowed paths to 8.7 yards per carry playing 1 1/2 quarters over their two preseason games. They blocked for 119 yards rushing, in the first quarter, Aug. 15 against Kansas City.
The team that Macdonald and Kubiak have vowed will run the ball and far better than the 29th-ranked rushing offense Seattle had last season romped 48 times for 268 yards and two touchdowns on the ground that rainy summer night against the Chiefs.
Now that training camp is over and the season is about to begin, The News Tribune asked the head coach: How did the full offseason participation from his players show up in training camp and this preseason, and how did it contribute to where his team is heading into the real games?
“Very glad you asked that,” Macdonald said Thursday.
“It’s incred...I mean, it’s so important,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, why did we practice this week?’ We could take this week (without a preseason game, two weeks before the opener) off.
“It’s about stacking wins. It’s about being with your teammates, building the connection, building your bodies, building the callous, understanding the details. Incremental gains all the time.”
“I found that when you do it with your teammates in this atmosphere, you work the hardest. You get the most out of it. You get the most bang for your buck, and your team becomes better for it.”
Macdonald said he and his Seahawks feel a lot better about this opener against San Francisco, enough to say “Bro, I really don’t care” about where their NFC West rivals are, because of the buy-in he got from his players voluntarily in April, May and June.
“I guarantee you if we didn’t have the attendance we had, now we would not be as confident going into the first game,” he said.
“The connection we had, the team unity we have, the shared understanding of what we’re trying to achieve — we would not be at this point if the guys didn’t make that decision to come to the offseason program.”
This story was originally published August 29, 2025 at 12:17 PM.
