Seahawks’ Macdonald: New OC Fleury brings his own twist

With new offensive coordinator Brian Fleury hailing from the same Shanahan coaching tree, the Seattle Seahawks will employ a similar West Coast offense to the one they ran last season under Klint Kubiak.

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But over the past few months, head coach Mike Macdonald has repeatedly emphasized that Fleury is adding his own twist.

Macdonald reiterated that again during a conversation with Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk ahead of Thursday’s training camp practice.

“The play calling is going to be different,” Macdonald said. “I mean, if he goes and tries to copy what Klint did, then we’re going to be in trouble. That’s the last thing we want. We did a lot of great things last year, but that was that team and Klint was making those decisions for that team.”

Aside from Fleury, the Seahawks return mostly the same group of players and coaches that hoisted the Lombardi Trophy in February. On offensive specifically, they return 14 of their top 15 players in terms of combined regular-season and postseason snaps.

But as the Seahawks aim to become just the third repeat Super Bowl champion this century, Macdonald has coined a “run it forward” mantra. Rather than simply duplicating what they did last year, the Seahawks are looking to continue growing and evolving.

“We have to free him up to give him that space to operate, … rather than be like, hey, we have to do this,” Macdonald said. “The principles of how we play – that’s kind of my job to make sure we play a certain way. But schematically how we build it, how we attack, how we game (plan) – all those different things, he’s done a great job of orchestrating that.”

A ‘rare’ perspective

Earlier this week, Seahawks left guard Grey Zabel told Brock and Salk that Fleury “sees the game of football differently than 99.9% of human beings do.”

Macdonald echoed a similar sentiment, saying that Fleury’s unique background on both sides of the ball enables him to see the game from a “rare” perspective.

“He sees it in 360 degrees, which is rare,” Macdonald said. “And so I’m really excited about that. It’s a lot of fun to talk football with him. I have a ton of confidence in how he sees it. I mean, shoot, I’m learning from him.”

Over the previous seven seasons in San Francisco, Fleury served as the 49ers’ tight ends coach (2022-25), run game coordinator (2025), offensive quality control coach (2020-21) and defensive quality control coach (2019).

Prior to that, Fleury was the Miami Dolphins’ director of football research (2017-18) and football research analyst (2016), the Cleveland Browns’ outside linebackers coach (2015) and assistant linebackers coach (2014), and the Buffalo Bills’ quality control coach (2013).

Before reaching the NFL coaching ranks, Fleury was a defensive coordinator at FCS-level Sacred Heart University and a defensive backs coach at FCS-level Towson University. And as a player, he was a quarterback at the University of Maryland and FCS-level Towson.

“He can sit there and see (our offense) through everybody’s perspective, including the quarterback,” Macdonald said. “He’s got a great feel for quarterback play and what he expects from our from our quarterbacks on a play-in, play-out basis, so it’s been great.”

Listen to the full Brock and Salk conversation with Mike Macdonald at this link or in the audio player near the middle of this story. Tune into Brock and Salk weekdays from 6-10 a.m. or find the podcast on the Seattle Sports app.

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