Salk: There’s a lot to like already about Seahawks’ Mike Macdonald

Anyone else really enjoying the start of the Seattle Seahawks’ Mike Macdonald era?

It shouldn’t be too hard right now. The team is 2-0 and many of the consistent complaints of the past few years have looked to be significantly improved.

Rost: The surprises from Seattle Seahawks after two weeks

The defense has been fast and aggressive. The offense has looked “modern.” The team has made key adjustments during games, and their communication on the field has been excellent. It hasn’t been perfect, but it’s hard to imagine asking for nor expecting much more. It’s been an excellent two weeks.

Those things are cool and I share in the excitement. But what has impressed me most about the new coach is the way in which he’s gone about his business. Macdonald has been open-minded, vulnerable and trusting – qualities we don’t often ascribe to top coaches, but ones that should lead to tremendous long-term success.

The open-mindedness started almost as soon as Macdonald took over the reins. Rather than stocking his coaching staff with friends and colleagues with whom he was familiar, he did almost exactly the opposite. And the most important hire he had to make was the offensive coordinator.

Macdonald has never coached offense. He wasn’t arriving with a chosen offensive philosophy that he needed to complement his defense. But even more, he was going to be spending an inordinate amount of time on the defense, so that would potentially cut short his availability to work on the offensive side of the ball. This coach, maybe more than others, needed to trust his offensive coordinator right away. He needed to know that the other side of the ball was in good hands. And despite that imperative, he hired someone he barely knew – former UW Huskies OC Ryan Grubb.

This was not guaranteed to work.

“Well, it’s not easy because defense requires a lot of a lot of my time,” Macdonald told us Monday during our weekly conversation with the Seahawks coach on Brock and Salk. “So we’re coming along, but it’s still a hefty part of (my) responsibility and there’s only so many hours in the day. I just think Ryan has a really open mind. And he listens and he’s willing to scrimmage things out situationally.”

The trust and open-mindedness is amazing. But the most rare quality Macdonald has displayed is his vulnerability. Most coaches are not, by nature, willing to admit what they don’t know. They feel a need to demonstrate that they know what they’re doing, they are worthy captains of the ship, and their plan will work. I would think that gets exacerbated among young coaches who don’t generate automatic respect through their record or pelts on the wall. It has to be hard to earn your credibility.

But rather than trying to prove himself, Macdonald has been willing to admit what he doesn’t know. He told us straight up that one reason he trusts Grubb to handle the offense is that he doesn’t know as much about that side of the ball yet. Rather than bloviating or faking it ’til he makes it, he simply admits where he has knowledge gaps, trusts the people under him to step up into the vacuum, and works to ask the right questions and learn what he needs to for the future.

Sounds simple, but it’s exceedingly rare.

He might be more willing to admit what he doesn’t know than any coach I have ever talked to. Maybe that’s easier to do when you are naturally smart and you’ve developed a reputation which proceeds you. But it stands out.

It revealed itself in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game when Macdonald was faced with a critical decision on fourth-and-1 at the New England 15-yard line and 58 seconds left in the game.

I disagree with his decision to kick a field goal. But I love his transparency of the process because it shows how willing he is to consider all the relevant information.

“It was a little bit longer and it comes down to, ‘Is it six inches, is it a yard, is it a yard and a half?’ That plays into what you’re going to call and your confidence on whether to go for it. Only having the two timeouts is definitely a factor.

“The numbers were about even, analytically speaking. As a matter of fact, it actually favored slightly to go for it in that situation.”

So, to be clear: he considered the analytical research, he used real-time relevant information including the exact distance and what had transpired the play before, he trusted his coaching staff, and he made a decision that he felt was right at the same time.

But that’s not all he said.

“We haven’t gone through these things as a whole staff, me personally as well,” Macdonald continued. “So, you’re trying to do kind of the wisdom of the crowd – what you feel like is kind of best practices as you’re going through things, navigating things for the first time. But these things are going to evolve (as) we get a feel for how we’re gonna manage the game, especially late in the game, these fourth-down decisions. (There is) lots of stuff that you’re just going through and you kind of start to (figure out). … You just try to keep getting better at the things and then it’ll become kind of molded in our identity as we go.”

Talk about refreshing! He made a difficult decision that went (slightly) against the analytical advice, it worked, and he still is open to the idea that maybe he should have done it differently and that he’ll continue to work on improving in these situations.

There are plenty of reasons to be impressed by the start of the Mike Macdonald era. But while we all had heard and seen just how well he could scheme up a defense, it’s his attitude and approach that I think will ultimately lead to his success.

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