Mike Macdonald is getting his wish.
Half of it, anyway.
The Seahawks’ second-year coach is going to have his team in joint practices with Seattle again this summer, as he did last preseason. The Seahawks and Packers will practice against each other in Green Bay in the days leading up to them playing their final game of the 2025 preseason at Lambeau Field Saturday, Aug. 23.
Matt Schneidman, Packers beat writer for The Athletic, was the first to confirm Wednesday what was becoming obvious from Seattle’s perspective.
Last summer the Packers had a joint practice with Denver at their Ray Nitschke Field in Green Bay, two days before they hosted the Broncos in a preseason game. Ray Nitschke Field is the outdoor practice field adjacent to the Packers’ indoor practice facility and to Lambeau Field, between Lombardi Avenue and Mike McCarthy Way.
Macdonald had joint practices with the Tennessee Titans in Nashville last summer. Those were the Seahawks’ first practices with another team since 1991.
Seattle’s coach wants double the joint practices this summer than just those at Green Bay.
Macdonald said last month at the NFL owners’ meetings in Florida this summer he hoped to have joint practices at home, at the Seahawks’ training facility in Renton, and away. Those would be around the team’s two preseason home games and one on the road.
But the Seahawks’ two home opponents for preseason games at Lumen Field are against Pete Carroll’s Las Vegas Raiders Thursday, Aug. 7, at 7 p.m., and the Kansas City Chiefs on Friday, Aug. 15, at 7 p.m. Carroll has already said he’s not having joint practices with his former Seahawks; he never had those while as Seattle’s coach from 2010-24. And Chiefs coach Andy Reid doesn’t like the idea of joint practices, either. Both veteran coaches don’t want to give away how their teams practice.
That left the Packers, the Seahawks’ third and final preseason-game foe.
Seattle general manager John Schneider has close ties to Green Bay and its franchise. He is a native of De Pere, Wisconsin, five miles from Lambeau Field. His first NFL job was a Packers scout in 1993.
Macdonald routinely had joint practices in the 10 years he spent in Baltimore as an assistant of Ravens coach John Harbaugh.
Macdonald values joint practices as much or more than the preseason games.
Last summer he moved the entire Seahawks franchise operation to Nashville for a week — equipment, security, public relations, all of it. The coach had all of Seattle’s available, healthy starting players scrimmaging against the Titans’ first-teamers in both practice days at Tennessee. It was the only time last preseason most of the Seahawks’ starters went pretty much full-go with contact in practices or games.
Asked there last August by The News Tribune if the joint practices are more important than that weekend’s preseason games, Macdonald said: “There’s an argument for that.”
Why does Macdonald like joint practices?
“One, the science behind it: To kind of callous the team, get ready to go for the long haul,” he said last summer when the Seahawks were traveling to scrimmage against the Titans. “And just looking for the competition within a structured setting. (I) think they’ve got a great team. They got a great coaching staff.
“So to do it in a tight manner like right here and instead of in a game, and kind of control the environment.”