Mike Macdonald’s journey to coaching Seahawks rarely strayed from football path
RENTON, Wash. – In Mike Macdonald’s 37 years – an age that makes him the youngest head coach in the NFL in 2024 and the youngest in Seahawks history – the one constant has been football.
“Actually, my first memory is throwing a football,” he said in August following a training-camp practice.
He paused, trying to recall more vividly that moment.
“I’m in like a highchair, I just remember,” he said. “Throwing one.”
A few years later, one of the first sporting events he recalls attending is a New England Patriots game with his father Hugh, just after the team drafted Drew Bledsoe first overall in 1993.
What stands out about that moment more than the final score is the way he felt being in the stadium.
“I just remember thinking, ‘This is pretty sweet,’ ” he recalled.
Soon after, his family moved from Boston to Roswell, Georgia, about 22 miles outside Atlanta.
It was there he began playing football in middle school, overriding the concerns of his father, who played on a nonvarsity team at Army but worried about injuries.
Mike Macdonald wasn’t content just to play.
His father taped the games with what Mike laughs and calls “this giant camcorder” so his son could study them later.
“We’d end up playing a team the second time,” Macdonald said. “So naturally I’d go back and watch that game, do a scouting report with some of my buddies like, ‘Hey, when they are in this formation they run (the ball).’ … I always got a kick out of that type of stuff.”
A few years later, he found a way during his journeys to and from school to feed his football obsession.
He enjoyed watching the “America’s Game” series on NFL Network – 1-hour minidocumentaries on every Super Bowl champion – and downloaded many on his phone.
“It’s probably not safe,” he said. “But I had like a phone holder in my car when I was in high school, and I had them downloaded. So I would put my phone there and I would just play them again. I’m not a big music guy, so I would just watch the videos on repeat.”
In high school, persistent issues with neck stingers as well as a knee injury suffered the week before his final game caused him to sit out his senior season.
No matter. He stayed involved by helping coach Xarvia Smith however he could, specifically with the linebacking group he’d hoped to lead as a player.
“He was like a coach on the field for me,” Smith said.
Macdonald enrolled at nearby University of Georgia. When he first enrolled, he wasn’t thinking of a future in coaching, instead majoring in business. In fact, he had some opportunities to play baseball, said by many to be his best sport – he was listed as a commit to Army at one point. But he said he felt going to Georgia was best for his long-term future.
At roughly the same time he showed up at UGA, his high school coach, Smith, became the head coach at Cedar Shoals High in Athens.
“I was going into business because I just kind of felt like it gave you the best options as you try to figure life out,” Macdonald said. “And then just divine intervention – my high-school coach gets the job in the town where I’m going to college. So it was like, ‘Holy smokes, this is something that I feel compelled to do.’ ”
Macdonald almost immediately called Smith. Macdonald took no chances.
“I put on a suit and tie and acted like I needed to interview with him,” Macdonald said. “He looked at me like I was an idiot when I showed up. But I just felt like if I’m going to this, I’m going to do this the right way.”
Macdonald coached the ninth-grade team and helped with the varsity on game nights. He says the ninth-grade team had six shutouts in nine games.
“He basically worked a college, NFL workload because we worked seven days a week,” Smith said. “My defensive system is pretty complicated and he learned it so quick and understood the game. … He might say, ‘Coach, the ball is on the right hash; they always run to this side, so you need to bring this blitz.’ I’d be like, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ ”
It wasn’t just X’s and O’s that impressed Smith.
“He got to understand how to be around minority kids,” Smith said. “It’s a predominantly minority school, low income, and he bonded very well with those kids.”
In what free time Macdonald had between that and his studies – he graduated summa cum laude with 3.98 GPA in finance from Georgia’s Terry College of Business – he hung around the UGA football offices, mostly with the team’s video coordinator, Joe Tereshinski.
That eventually led to a meeting with UGA defensive coordinator Todd Grantham and an offer to be a volunteer coach at Georgia in 2010.
“I just loved football,” he said. “And then once you learn about the team aspect and how you can get advantages and you are really learning about relationships you can build, it was just like: ‘Man, this is pretty awesome. Why would you not want to do this?’ ”
Which is why it might be surprising to learn that a few years later, Macdonald was on the verge of giving it all up.
Georgia on his mind
Macdonald’s first job at Georgia in 2010 as a volunteer graduate assistant led to a three-year stint from 2011-13 as a graduate assistant as he pursued a master’s degree in sports management. He worked primarily with the safeties and as a quality-control assistant.
It didn’t take him long to win over players.
Christian Robinson, a Georgia linebacker from 2009-12, recalls a sequence in a game against Kentucky in 2011 that he said helped influenced how he does his job as the outside linebackers coach for Kalen DeBoer at Alabama.
Georgia had to beat Kentucky in a late November game to assure getting to the SEC title game.
As the second half began, Georgia held a slim 12-10 lead when Kentucky faced a third-and-1 at its 29.
As Robinson recalls it, Macdonald spent the week instructing him how to fit up the block on a specific running play to the boundary side of the field and take out the lead blocker and allow others to make the tackle.
“Shaun Williams (a safety for Georgia who would go on to play nine years in the NFL) makes the play and they had to punt and everyone else goes running up to Shaun, and rightly so – he made an amazing play,” Robinson said. “But as they are, Mike is running up to me saying, ‘You did your part, and I notice that.’ That meant a lot to me, and I never forgot that.”
Georgia won 19-10 to advance to the SEC title game.
By the end of the 2013 season Macdonald had been a volunteer coach or graduate assistant at Georgia for four years.
It was a job that for all the glamour of game day included printing out playbooks each week and setting up tables for team dinners.
By then Macdonald had completed his master’s, was on the verge of turning 27, was no longer eligible to be a GA at Georgia and had no certainty about his coaching future.
He thought his big break was on the horizon when Grantham became the defensive coordinator at Louisville following the 2013 season. Grantham hired his brother as inside linebackers coach instead.
“I think that kind of broke Mike’s heart a little bit, because he actually did a lot to help Grantham those years at Georgia and he thought for sure he would be on that staff with him,” Smith said. “And he didn’t get to go.”
Macdonald was offered a chance to go Louisville as a graduate assistant, but that wasn’t what he wanted.
“I was kind of discouraged with the coaching thing, was kind of burned out,” Macdonald said. “I was a GA for three years. I wanted to be a position coach. I wanted to be on a certain trajectory.”
He’d been turned down for an internship in the scouting department for the Baltimore Ravens in 2013, admitting frankly he made a big mistake during his interview with college scouting director Joe Hortiz.
“I mentioned, ‘I think I still want to coach even though I’m going to be on scouting,’ and he looked at me funny,” Macdonald said. “And I said, ‘Oh no, I said the wrong thing.’ So, long story short, they said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ ”
With his football future uncertain, he accepted a job with the accounting firm KPMG in Atlanta in December 2013.
“It felt like it was time (and) that there wasn’t anything that was going to come up,” he said. “So, I was kind of like, ‘OK, well you have to start and go make some money.’ ”
Taking the KPMG job followed the advice and path of his father, whose more than 30 years in the business world included founding the sales consulting company SalesScope Inc.
Hugh Macdonald loved football but worried about the life of a coach. “It was funny because his dad didn’t want him to coach and I think was kind of mad at me when he got into it,” said Smith, who hired him for that initial job at Cedar Shoals. “I think his dad wanted him to go into the business world.”
Robinson was beginning his career as a graduate assistant at Georgia and shared an office with Macdonald.
“I remember sitting in that old office there and he’s kind of at this breaking point of, ‘What do I do?’ ” Robinson said. “Because he loves football and he’s about to just walk away from it and he was about to take that job.”
Then, as Robinson said, “He got an opportunity.”
Quoth the Raven: internship
Macdonald was still working as a GA at Georgia in spring 2014 with the KPMG job set to start a few months later when he got a call about a job in Baltimore. This time, it was for an internship as a coach as part of a new program instituted by Ravens head coach John Harbaugh.
In a 2022 news conference, Macdonald recalled he got a call from former associate head coach/special teams coordinator Jerry Rosburg about the internship.
“At (that) point in my life, it was just like a call from God,” he said.
Macdonald said it was the “one of the easiest decisions of my” life to spurn KPMG for the Ravens job.
He shared an office with Chris Horton, a former UCLA player who is Ravens special teams coordinator, and former director of coaching analytics Eugene Shen. Like being a GA, the job contained lots of unglamorous tasks.
“We sat in that office together, broke down plays and drew (play) cards for the scout team,” Horton said during a news conference a few years ago.
To Macdonald, it was basically heaven.
“I’d have just been kicking myself (if he hadn’t taken it),” he said. “And it’s not anything against someone who doesn’t want to go into coaching, but it’s against anyone who doesn’t follow their passion. That’s all it was, was just something that I felt really strongly about. I think God is kind of talking to you like, ‘Hey, this is what I have planned for you so just listen.’ ”
Meteoric rise
With the Ravens, the rise that would culminate in becoming the youngest coach in the NFL this season became meteoric.
He was promoted to defensive assistant in 2015, working with Don “Wink” Martindale with the inside linebackers. He moved to defensive backs coach in 2017, then linebackers coach from 2018-20.
When Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh fired defensive coordinator Don Brown following a disastrous 2020 pandemic season in which the Wolverines went 2-4 and allowed 42 points to Rutgers and 49 to Wisconsin, he needed just seconds to follow the advice of his brother John and hire Macdonald as his new DC.
The Wolverines responded by going 12-2 and improving from 95th in the nation in points allowed per game (34.5) to eighth (17.4).
As that season wrapped up, Martindale, who’d become Baltimore’s DC in 2018, and the Ravens parted ways following a 2021 season when Baltimore went 8-9, finishing 19th in defense, allowing 23.1 points per game.
John Harbaugh needed even less time to take him back from Jim and make him the DC of the Ravens.
Baltimore improved to third in points allowed in 2022 at 18.5 per game, and first in 2023 at 16.5.
“The things that you see in Mike, it’s a great combination of intelligence, common sense, people skills,” John Harbaugh said in a 2022 news conference. “It’s the really unique, hard-to-find balance of confidence and humility.”
And at the end of the 2023 season at age 36 (he turned 37 in June), he was ready to take the next step.
As Seahawks general manager John Schneider said on the day Macdonald was introduced as the team’s new coach Feb. 1, he ended up praying for the Ravens to lose that day they hosted Kansas City in the AFC title game, unsure if the team would be able to wait to talk to him until after the Super Bowl.
“I was at church, and people were probably looking at me like, ‘Wow, that guy has really been sinning a lot; that guy is praying his tail off right now,’ ” Schneider said.
The easy categorization is that he is the polar opposite of Carroll, as the Seahawks went from a 72-year-old who was the oldest in the NFL to someone who is almost half his age and is the youngest.
Where Carroll seemed to so often appeal to emotion, Macdonald is the analytical business major.
Cornerback Devon Witherspoon called Macdonald “nerdy” a few months ago.
Such categorizations are far too simplistic.
Carroll, it might be forgotten, also got a business degree as an undergrad at Pacific and briefly took a job selling roofing materials before he decided – as Macdonald would four decades later – to follow his passion in football.
Robinson marvels at how close it could have come to not happening, saying if Macdonald had taken the KPMG job he would undoubtedly have done well. And then, who knows?
“It just shows you in one moment, you are about to walk away from something,” Robinson said. “And if you knew what was on the other end.”
That “other end” now is on the other side of the country, where Macdonald faces the hefty task of filling the shoes of not only the most successful coach in team history but one who is on the Mount Rushmore of Seattle coaches.
“I can guarantee you this: You will get everything out of myself and our coaching staff every day,” Macdonald said the day his hiring was made official. “We will not stop until we get to where we want to get.”
History has shown Macdonald usually ends up where he wants to be.