Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald granted newfound fame with Super Bowl win

SAN FRANCISCO — Two years ago on this date, Mike Macdonald’s name was known avidly by NFL cognoscenti due to his increasing rep as one of the game’s most creative defensive minds and was becoming known to Seahawks fans who’d just seen him named as the team’s new head coach a week earlier.

Otherwise, he wasn’t someone who had to worry much about being recognized often in public.

That figures to begin changing now that he is the third-youngest head coach in NFL history to win a Super Bowl, doing so with a team that appears built to sustain its success.

On Monday, Macdonald began to step fully into a new world for both himself and his team.

At 8:30 a.m., Macdonald and running back Kenneth Walker III attended an annual rite for the Super Bowl-winning coach and MVP, a day-after news conference at which each also posed for photos with the Lombardi and MVP trophies alongside NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

“The Seahawks emerged as the victor properly,” Goodell said. “They played a fantastic game, they’ve had an unbelievable season. Coach Macdonald has brought a leadership style, not just to the Seahawks but to the NFL, that will have a lasting impact on the league (and) he’s done this in two years as a turnaround.”

Then he turned to Macdonald and said, “You get to face the media as a Super Bowl champion.”

That was hardly all Macdonald had to face in his first 24 hours as one of just 37 coaches in NFL history to win a Super Bowl.

After Sunday night’s 29-13 win over the New England Patriots at Levi’s Stadium, the team returned to its hotel in San Jose for the traditional victory party where Macdonald himself introduced Ludacris (T-Pain also performed).

Like most of the rest of the Seahawks, he’d barely slept before he had to head back up to the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the news conference with Goodell, where he also handled a few other media responsibilities.

Then Macdonald was set to jet down to Los Angeles to appear on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, due to air Monday night (the other headlining guest is Stellan Skarsgard).

Then it will be back to Seattle where Macdonald will begin the task Tuesday of deciding how to reconfigure his assistant coaching staff with offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak leaving to become the head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders.

It will be the third straight year Macdonald is having to make an OC hire, having hired Kubiak around this time a year ago to take over for the fired Ryan Grubb, who was Macdonald’s OC in 2024 during his first season as head coach of the Seahawks.

It’s thought Macdonald is seriously considering making an internal hire, such as quarterbacks coach Andrew Janocko or run game specialist and assistant offensive line coach Justin Outten.

Advantages of keeping it in-house are obvious after the sea of change last year; it would keep continuity with the scheme as well as the personalities running things. If an internal hire is made, the Seahawks hope they won’t lose much of their offensive coaching staff, and the staff overall, though Kubiak could take a few current assistants with him to Las Vegas.

Wednesday will feature the parade along a 2-mile stretch of Fourth Avenue for Macdonald and his players, after which the team will begin to scatter for the offseason.

Celebrating, of course, will continue well into the spring and summer.

But the challenge of assembling and guiding a winning team never ends in the NFL, and in just two weeks Macdonald and his staff will head to the annual scouting combine in Indianapolis and then prepare for free agency in early March and the draft the following month.

Macdonald also knows the Seahawks will now be under intense scrutiny from the rest of the league, especially with a defense that ranked first in the NFL in points allowed and shut out the Patriots through three quarters Sunday.

Opposing coaches will undoubtedly spend countless hours poring over film trying to find weaknesses in Macdonald’s scheme.

Macdonald said Monday morning he knows that’s coming but says he already lives with a mindset of constantly evolving.

“We use the term ‘chasing edges’ here in Seattle,” he said. “You have to live like that. You can’t be copying everybody else. We want to be at the forefront of things.

“We know that we are target number one now. But again, it’s really going to be our mentality for us to keep pushing the envelope with our personnel where we can take things at our speed. And so there are going to be times when we feel like teams get a bead on us and we have to move and shake and that’s happened several times throughout this season, as well. That’s just how we operate.”

In fact, constantly evolving helped get them this far in the first place.

The Seahawks were one of the lowest-blitzing teams in the NFL this season at 19.3% — seventh in the league by one metric — heading into the Super Bowl.

But Macdonald kept tweaking the game plan into Saturday afternoon and added a few blitzes.

A few of those the team unveiled specifically on the first few series to try to put heat on New England second-year quarterback Drake Maye.

Two corner blitzes by Devon Witherspoon on third downs ended the Pats’ first two series, one forcing a hurried pass, the other a sack.

Unofficially, Seattle blitzed on five of the first 12 plays and, via NFL Next Gen Stats, the Seahawks had a 40% blitz rate in the first half before relying almost solely on a four-man rush in the second half.

“It’s funny,” Macdonald said Monday when asked about the defensive effort. “I told the team on Saturday I’ve got a bad habit of hemming and hawing in my office with the rest of our coaching staff thinking about plays and what we’re going to run and how it’s going to go. And then you get around the guys and you see them and all the sudden all those worries kind of go away magically.

“And I think that speaks to how they played,” he said. “It became very clear, very early that they were a determined bunch, that they were going to play our style of ball last night, and at that point the plays became irrelevant and it was really the style of how the guys played and just to play that relentlessly throughout the game was really impressive and I’m really proud of those guys. That was a remarkable game by our defense.”

One that figures to be life-changing for all involved.