PALM BEACH, Fla.—When Mike Macdonald began his coaching career at Cedar Shoals High School, a college student coaching high school freshmen, he learned from his head coach, Xarvia Smith a lesson about expectations that has stuck with him throughout his coaching journey, all the way to his job as the head coach of the Seahawks.
If you're going to bother playing games, and doing all the work that goes into preparing for them, then you should expect to win them.
Which is why Macdonald, without hesitation, said his goal for this year—and any other year for that matter—is to reach the pinnacle of his sport.
"I want to win the Super Bowl," Macdonald said Tuesday at the NFL Annual Meeting. "That's the expectation, man. Every time you step on the field, your expectation is to win. When I was a high school coach, our head coach, Xarvia Smith, got the staff together in the summer and he's like, 'Hey, write down what you think our record is going to be this year.' And guys would turn in like 8-2 or 7-3, 9-1 or whatever. And to those people, he was like, 'What games are we going to lose so we can just go ahead and not play those games?' So if you go into this whole process not expecting to win, you're not doing it the right way."
The Seahawks will look different this season, particularly on offense having made changes at offensive coordinator, quarterback and receiver, but the core principles Macdonald is trying to instill in the team don't change, and it will be up to him and the coaching staff to mold this year's roster into a championship-caliber team.
"Right now, we're preaching tough and connected," Macdonald said. "So how do we build a tough football team that goes through people, not around them, and how do we become the most connected team in the league? That's what we're shooting for."
The Seahawks are excited about what offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak and the rest of the new coaches on offense will bring to the team, and about what newcomers like quarterback Sam Darnold, receiver Cooper Kupp and defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence will add, but another reason for the organization's optimism is the fact that Macdonald and his coaching staff are, as general manager and president of football operation John Schneider put it a day earlier, "so much farther ahead" than they were last year.
"We're so much further ahead in knowing what each one of those guys really wants in a pass-rusher or a linebacker," Schneider said. "Guys were just getting settled last year, so it was really hard to be like, 'OK, we're going to trust this coach because he's coached that guy,' and we don't necessarily know that coach that well yet, and we're not all speaking the same language as well as we should be. So I think we're just much further ahead and able to compensate for some of those deficiencies quicker than we were last year. I'm excited about it."
Macdonald won't allow himself to feel like he's ever ahead; there's always more work to do, but he does notice the difference having been through his first year on the job.
"I understand why he's saying ahead; I never feel ahead," Macdonald said when asked about Schneider's comment. "I always feel like we're chasing, there's always a sense of urgency with what we're doing, but having the year together—again, these were all people we've never worked with before, this was all our first time working together for the most part. Every time you get through a new cadence part of the year, it's not the first time you've ever done it, where that was the case last year. So we have a foundational knowledge about how we want to operate, what's important to us, what type of players we're looking for. All of those things, we have some ground that we're standing on."