1. The Seahawks are ahead of where they were last season after making a coaching change a year ago.
The Seahawks have added some players they really like in free agency, including Pro Bowlers Sam Darnold, Cooper Kupp and DeMarcus Lawrence, and with five picks in the first three rounds, they also will expect to add some difference makers in the draft. But another reason they're optimistic about the 2025 season is that, thanks to the year of experience Macdonald and his coaching staff have under their belt, they feel like they're well ahead of where they were at this time a year ago.
"We're so much further ahead in knowing what each one of those guys really wants in a pass-rusher or a linebacker," general manager and president of football operations John 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."
Along those lines, Macdonald was asked what he knows now, 14 months into the job, that he didn't at this time last year.
"I think there's a lot I didn't know i didn't know last year; there's still a lot I don't know that I don't know," he said. "It's not like I'm the expert after a year. But every time there's a new part of the year, it's not like, 'Oh crap, here we are.' It's, 'OK, we did it last year, this is what we learned from it, this is what we liked about it, bing, bang, boom,' rather than just saying, 'This is how want to operate,' then we kind of learned as things went along. So that'll be helpful."