By Bob Condotta Seattle Times
Seahawks fans might not have paid much attention to the news Monday that the Tennessee Titans had fired coach Brian Callahan.
But Callahan’s firing was the latest evidence that Seahawks general manager John Schneider appears to have gotten it right in hiring Mike Macdonald as the successor to Pete Carroll.
Macdonald and Callahan were each hired following the 2023 season. They were part of a group of eight new coaches hired around the league.
Three have already been fired. Jerod Mayo (Patriots) and Antonio Pierce (Raiders) were also fired after 4-13 seasons in 2024.
Of the eight, Callahan’s tenure was the most disastrous.
After going 3-14 last season and landing the No. 1 pick in the draft (former WSU quarterback Cam Ward) the Titans were 1-5 this season, outscored by a whopping 161-83, before Callahan was let go with a record of 4-19.
In an alternate universe, the Titans might well have ended up with Macdonald.
The Titans, who officially cut ties with longtime coach Mike Vrabel after a season when it was obvious the move was coming, interviewed Macdonald on Jan. 13, only three days after the Seahawks fired Carroll, and two days before it was reported that the Seahawks had sent out official requests for interviews.
“Macdonald put on a strong initial interview (with the Titans) but wasn’t chosen,” stated CBSSports.com on Tuesday detailing Callahan’s tenure in Tennessee.
Callahan’s offensive background and history working with quarterbacks was said to be the primary reasons the Titans picked him.
And who knows? Maybe Macdonald was holding out for a team that appeared to be less of a rebuild, as the Seahawks definitely were.
He was still busy working as defensive coordinator of the Ravens, who lost in the AFC title game to Kansas City, which meant he couldn’t be officially hired until his season was completed. The Titans hired Callahan on Jan. 22, six days before the Ravens’ season was complete.
Six of eight teams made hires before the Seahawks got it done with Macdonald on Jan. 31.
The next day, Washington hired former Seahawks defensive coordinator Dan Quinn, who was also an option to return to Seattle, to complete the coach hiring cycle.
With each coach one season and six games into their tenures, only Quinn and Jim Harbaugh — who was destined to land with the Chargers once he decided to leave Michigan — have better records than Macdonald.
But barely.
Quinn and Harbaugh are each 15-8 to Macdonald’s 14-9.
No coach hired in 2024 is hotter of late than Macdonald.
The Seahawks are 10-4 in the last 14 games (so are the Quinn-led Commanders, though they are 3-3 this season to Seattle’s 4-2).
Only the defending champion Eagles and Tampa Bay have better marks in that span at 11-3 — and Seahawks fans don’t need reminding how they let one get away against the Bucs two Sundays ago.
The Seahawks rank fifth in the NFL this week in points scored and sixth in fewest points allowed, and have a point differential of plus-49 that is tied for second with the Lions and behind only the plus-78 of the surprising Indianapolis Colts.
Macdonald is tied for the best 23-game start to a head coaching career in team history.
Chuck Knox was also 14-9 at the same point of his career seven games into the 1984 season. That team won its next seven in a row as part of an eight-game winning streak en route to going 12-4. So Macdonald has some work to do to keep pace there.
Macdonald’s record at this stage of his career is better than the two coaches who led the Seahawks to Super Bowls — Mike Holmgren, who was 11-12 after 23 games, and Pete Carroll, who was 9-14.
Every situation, of course, is different.
Holmgren was called on to lead the Seahawks out of the drudgery of the ‘90s and 10 consecutive years without a postseason appearance. They were 9-23 in the two years before Carroll arrived in 2010, including 5-11 under Jim Mora in 2009.
Macdonald took over a team a year removed from a postseason berth that has had only one losing season since 2011.
Still, there have been plenty of tests.
Macdonald had to significantly remake the defense on the fly at midseason last year when it became apparent the inside linebacking duo of Tyrel Dodson and Jerome Baker wasn’t working.
The Seahawks are not only 10-4 since the bye a year ago, and after remaking the linebacking corps, but has held eight of 14 foes to 18 points or fewer since.
Macdonald appears to have well navigated the challenge of firing offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb after last season and hiring Klint Kubiak as his replacement, as well as breaking in new quarterback Sam Darnold as the replacement for Geno Smith.
Macdonald, who was the youngest coach in the NFL at age 36 when hired, has showed a willingness and ability to tweak things such as the team’s practice schedules and his own game-week schedules as he’s adjusted to being a head coach for the first time.
And he’s done so while instilling his own personality on the franchise. Stacking Wins, for instance, has replaced Always Compete as the dominant mantra seen and heard throughout the VMAC.
While some questioned if Macdonald was moving on too quickly from the Carroll era, it’s worth remembering that one of Carroll’s biggest pieces of advice for coaches is to be themselves. Carroll often said it was when he stopped trying to be like other coaches that he had his greatest success.
Macdonald’s Stacking Wins allows the team to remember its past, but with his own new touch.
Recall the furor shortly after Macdonald was hired when the team took down large pictures of great moments of the Carroll era that lined one hallway?
That hallway is now lined with a photo of every victory in the team’s history dating to 1976 (the pictures include a score and date), symbolizing Macdonald’s Stacking Wins philosophy.
Along the way, he’s won over the team with a steady style that players say doesn’t waver in the wake of victory or defeat.
“That helps a lot because it’s not about the win, it’s not about the loss, it’s about the process,” defensive end Leonard Williams said last week. “It would be bad for us to come in after a win and be feeling ourselves and not go back to what got us the win, which was the process. It would also be bad on the opposite end if we lost the game and came in hanging our heads and trying to change something to get a win the next week.
“We always talk about process over results, and I think that’s continuing to show up.”