How Seahawks’ Mike Macdonald’s Super Bowl LX masterpiece was years in the making

For a man loath to talk about himself, Mike Macdonald had the perfect reaction when the cameras finally found him: nothing but awe. He stared at the sky. He saw the confetti coming down. He didn’t say a word, a disbelieving, almost wondrous grin sprawling across his face. His Seahawks had done all the talking in a 29-13 Super Bowl LX win over the Patriots.

Later, when informed by ESPN’s Chris Berman that, at 38, he was the third-youngest coach to win the Super Bowl, Macdonald managed just “That’s pretty awesome.”

A sheepish grin.

“Look, I’m — this is bad TV. I got nothing to say on this.”

But Berman finally cracked the code when he asked about lifting the Lombardi Trophy.

“It’s a little lighter than I thought,” Macdonald said. “But the cool part was in the locker room, you could see all the fingerprints on it on the locker room, and that’s pretty awesome. Just shows you all the guys had an opportunity to get it, pass it around. It was freaking so cool.”

It’s fitting that Macdonald noticed the fingerprints, because his were all over this triumph.

We can break down the X’s and the O’s, and there are plenty. Take Devon Witherspoon, a heat-seeking missile of a cornerback whom Macdonald called the “lifeblood of our football team.” A second-team All-Pro selection who covers with the best of them and hits with the best of them, Witherspoon hadn’t had a single snap as a pass rusher since Week 16. That’s right: no blitzes in the final two weeks of the regular season, nor in either postseason game.

He rushed the passer six times in the Super Bowl, including twice in the first quarter — once disrupting Drake Maye, once sacking him. It was clear Macdonald, with two weeks to prepare, had taken the early lead in the chess game, one he wouldn’t relinquish.

“We had some pressures with ‘Spoon’ in the game plan,” Macdonald told ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt. “We haven’t really sent him that much this year, but we felt like there were some opportunities in some of the longer down and distances, and he made them come to life. Sometimes it’s not how you actually draw it up. The player’s got to go make plays, and that’s what he did.”

He’s right. The Jimmys and Joes are often more important than the X’s and the O’s, and the Seahawks had a decided edge in talent against an overwhelmed Patriots offensive line. But Macdonald contributed to that. Ten Seahawks registered at least one pressure. Four registered at least one sack.

Maye took six sacks, threw two interceptions and lost a fumble, looking unsettled from the jump. The Seahawks played their highest rate of cover six (45% of snaps) all season, 10 percent above their previous season high, per Pro Football Focus. 

There was a time when Bill Belichick was known as the master of crushing young opponents, making them “see ghosts,” as a young Sam Darnold once said. Macdonald isn’t there yet, but this was a Belichickian game plan and defensive performance on the grandest stage, against Belichick’s former franchise, no less. Macdonald is now 7-0 (including playoffs) against first- or second-year quarterbacks, per CBS Sports research.

He’s also the first head coach to win a Super Bowl as a team’s primary defensive play caller. But there’s so much more to being a coach than designing and calling great plays.

Macdonald went 10-7 in 2024, his debut as a head coach after an improbable rise from Georgia graduate assistant to near-accountant to Ravens assistant to Ravens defensive coordinator to Seahawks coach. It was an honorable debut campaign. Impressive, even.

It wasn’t enough for Macdonald. He fired offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb, saying, “I felt like the direction our offense was gong was different than the vision that I had for our team, and it felt like it was just a necessary decision at this point.”

That was a big call from a 37-year-old coach who had one year of experience under his belt. More big calls would come. The Seahawks traded away Geno Smith and DK Metcalf. They brought in Darnold. They drafted Grey Zabel to solidify Darnold’s protection. They drafted Nick Emmanwori to be a versatile chess piece in the secondary, not unlike the one Macdonald had so much success with in Baltimore: Kyle Hamilton. They brought in Cooper Kupp to be a reliable pass catcher alongside rising superstar Jaxon Smith-Njigba.

Perhaps most importantly, Macdonald got the hire at offensive coordinator absolutely right in Klint Kubiak. Again, it wasn’t like the 2024 Seahawks had a bad offense, per se. It just wasn’t the one Macdonald had envisioned. And Macdonald’s vision proved prescient. Kubiak, like his father Gary, relied heavily on play-action dropbacks and under-center offense. It was a system that allowed Darnold to thrive, and as the season wore on, the running game started to thrive, too.

Macdonald knew this team could be good early.

“I think we knew in (training) camp, and you just felt that we were together,” he said. “Not having been there before, not having led a team like that, you’re always trying to figure out, ‘OK, where is this going?’ But take it one day at a time, and then we started stacking wins towards the middle of the season. You felt like we could win different ways, and that gives you a lot of confidence going every week, and we just kept stacking, kept stacking.

“We never really took a step back in terms of our approach, and what a great group, just what a remarkable group. They decided they were gonna play a certain way and be a certain team, and they did it.”

Macdonald led them there. It’s no coincidence that many players have been their best selves under Macdonald. Witherspoon was arguably the best cornerback in football. Leonard Williams had made one Pro Bowl — way back in 2016 — when Macdonald took over. He has made two Pro Bowls in two seasons since. Byron Murphy II had two sacks in the Super Bowl. So did Derick Hall, who also forced a fumble Murphy recovered.

Want more Macdonald magic? Midway through the 2024 season, the Seahawks traded a fourth-round pick and Jerome Baker for Ernest Jones IV, a seemingly unremarkable swap of linebackers. Jones had fallen out of favor with the Rams and was stuck on a Titans team going nowhere.

Instead, Jones became a stud — a second-team All-Pro — in the middle of the NFL’s stingiest defense. We can go on and on. Julian Love. Josh Jobe. Uchenna Nwosu, who had a pick-six in the Super Bowl. They’re all veterans who have played some of their best ball under Macdonald.

That’s one of the best measures of a coach and his organization. How many players can he get to produce at their best? How does he handle the seemingly minute details? The Seahawks have some of the NFL’s best special teams units. They were one of the league’s least-penalized teams. When backups had to step in, they did so with aplomb. Macdonald many times credited his coaching staff, but he’s the one who put that coaching staff together. Finally, he had (indirectly) credited himself — kind of.

“When you get in my job, you realize very quickly you don’t know all the answers,” Macdonald said. “So you find those who do. And my job is to make it come to life and make it come together, and just stay steadfast, towards the vision of what we wanted to create.”

Perhaps it’s because he calls the defense, not the offense, but Macdonald doesn’t get talked about like a Sean McVay or a Kyle Shanahan or other young coaches of that ilk. He didn’t show up on any Coach of the Year ballots last year. He finished third this year behind the Patriots’ Mike Vrabel and the Jaguars’ Liam Coen — both of whom he beat this season, by the way.

And Macdonald is totally OK with that. Maybe he even likes it. He didn’t play in the NFL. He didn’t even play in college. A dozen years ago, he nearly became an accountant. He’s not one for the spotlight.  

Yet now, as a Super Bowl champion, he’s going to get it. He’s part mad scientist, part tone setter, part visionary. He made the right hires, found the right players, and made the right calls. He did it all as a 38-year-old who admits he still doesn’t know it all.

But now he’s won it all. He’s returned the Seahawks to glory incredibly quickly.

“Never in my wildest dreams,” Macdonald said of his rise.

But this is no dream. He’s built it, he’s earned it, and now he has a ring to prove it. Mike Macdonald is one of the very best in the business, and if history is any indicator, his rise is only beginning.