Why is Mike Macdonald bringing his Seahawks across the country for joint practices with another team in the days between two preseason games 2,000 miles apart?
Because these practices are more important than those games.
“There’s an argument for that,” Seattle’s new coach said.
The NFL’s youngest head coach and his Seahawks landed here in Tennessee Tuesday. Their joint practices with the Titans are Wednesday and Thursday mornings at the Saint Thomas Sports Park along the Cumberland River north of downtown Nashville.
These are Seattle’s first joint practices since July 1991. Then-coach Chuck Knox took his Seahawks to Portland to scrimmage the Atlanta Falcons on a Friday night in old Civic Stadium. Portland State University sold the tickets for it.
Macdonald’s team and fellow first-year Titans head coach Brian Callahan’s Titans are scheduled to drill and scrimmage against each other for 2 hours and 15 minutes each morning. They practices are scheduled to be full pads, full go, starters versus starters, Geno Smith, DK Metcalf and friends against former teammates Jamal Adams and Quandre Diggs.
That’s not what the Seahawks-Titans preseason game Saturday in Nashville (4 p..m., KING-5 TV) is going to be.
“Why (are) we’re doing it?” Macdonald said this week. “(For) one, the science behind it: To kind of callous the team, get ready to go for the long haul.
“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.”
In other words, the Seahawks don’t want Smith and the Titans don’t want starting quarterback Will Levis to get hit. So they won’t. That’s something neither coaching staff can ensure in any NFL preseason game (which are getting more meaningless and pointless by the summer).
Macdonald and new offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb held Smith and most starters on the new Seahawks offense out of the team’s preseason opener last weekend at the Los Angeles Chargers. They aren’t holding them out of these joint practices with the Titans.
Then Macdonald will hold most of them out of the game Saturday in Nashville.
Macdonald has said these joint practices are Smith’s and Metcalf’s and Tyler Lockett’s big chances to cement the installation of Grubb’s new offense this month. It likely will be their only time to do that against another team’s starters before the games get real for them and the Seahawks beginning Sept. 8 against Denver in the season opener at Lumen Field.
“For the guys, they’re getting those reps. The starters probably won’t play in the game, they’ll get the majority of the practice reps,” Macdonald said. “We’ll get threes out there, as well.
“So, there’s a method behind the madness. But you shouldn’t see a lot of the starters on Saturday.”
Macdonald has done this for years, in his previous decade as an assistant to John Harbaugh with the Baltimore Ravens. The Ravens commonly do it with the nearby Washington Commanders in training camp.
Macdonald, the Ravens’ defensive coordinator the last two years, chose the Titans once the NFL announced the preseason schedule in May partly because of his familiarity with the team from playing them for years in the AFC.
Another reason: The Titans’ defensive coordinator, Dennard Wilson, was Macdonald’s defensive backs coach with Baltimore last season. So he trusts Wilson to control these joint practices how Macdonald and Callahan’s Titans want them controlled.
What The News Tribune will be watching for along the sidelines of these Seahawks-Titans joint practices:
1. Flavor in Seattle’s schemes
The Seahawks are completely changing every system they have on the field: offense, defense and special teams, with new coordinators for each among the 22 new coaches for 2024.
In the preseason game last weekend at the Chargers, Macdonald barely called anything but base concepts with minimal pre- and no post-snap movement of his defense players. No layered schemes. No confusing the offense at the snap. Nothing of what Macdonald did last year to make Baltimore the first NFL defense to lead the league in fewest points allowed, sacks and turnovers produced. Seahawks offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb similarly kept his Baskin-Robbins-like offensive schemes vanilla.
That’s because the entire league can study the open-source game film from television broadcasts of preseason games.
The joint practices aren’t televised. Media and fans in attendance are prohibited from capturing with their smart phones or otherwise video-taping the scrimmaging. Grubb and Macdonald can go 31 flavors in their schemes and only the Titans will see them. And the Seahawks don’t play them this regular season.
No, they aren’t going to show the Titans everything in their playbooks. But the Seahawks are likely to show more than they did in any preseason games. These practices are Macdonald’s, Grubb’s and Smith’s only chances to feel and see how these new offenses and defenses work against opposing starters before the season begins.
“It’s an opportunity to evaluate a lot of the guys, where our starters are at, going against their starters,” Macdonald said.
We’re expecting to see in Nashville Wednesday and Thursday the schemes the Seahawks have been drilling against each other for months on the practice fields in Renton — and not what the rest of the football world will see Saturday against the Titans, or saw last Saturday against the Chargers.
2. Byron Murphy against starters
The Seahawks’ rookie 16th-overall pick in the draft this spring was the best player on the field last weekend against L.A. The Chargers tried double- and triple-teaming him, in a preseason game, and the fast, strong defensive tackle pushed two and three blockers into the quarterback and running back to ruin plays.
By the time Murphy entered, on the third defensive series, the Chargers had replaced the four starting offensive linemen that began that game.
Wednesday and Thursday, Murphy is going to get snaps against the Titans’ starting line. We’re watching 91 for Seattle very closely in those reps.
“Byron did play very well, all the things that we saw during practice,” Macdonald said. “But same idea of, ‘Hey, it was a small dosage in terms of what we’re asking you to do.’
“Now let’s up that a little bit and see how far he can take it.”
3. Dre’Mont Jones and run defense
Macdonald is trying to find the players who will stop the run on the edge. If you don’t do that, you don’t play defensive end and outside linebacker for him.
Outside linebacker Uchenna Nwosu got a contract worth up to $59 million following his career-high 9 1/2 sacks in the 2022 season. Then he tore his pectoral last early October.
The Seahawks’ run defense without Nwosu setting his edge and thrawting outside zone and sweeps was horrid.
In the five games before Nwosu’s season-ending injury in 2023, Seattle was allowing 79.2 yards rushing per game. In the 11 games after Nwosu missed to finish the season, the Seahawks allowed a dismal 166.3 yards rushing per game. That included 200-plus yards by Pittsburgh and Arizona. Baltimore would have rushed for 300 in a November blowout of Seattle but the Ravens took two kneel downs at the Seahawks’ goal line to end that game.
Now Nwosu is back and fully healthy. He played two series against the Chargers last weekend. They gained 7 yards in the 6 plays he and the Seahawks’ starting defense was in that game.
Who will be the outside linebacker opposite Nwosu the Seahawks can count on to stop the run and rush the quarterback? Boye Mafe has had a subpar camp in Macdonald’s new system. The new coaches are wondering about him enough that Dre’Mont Jones, the defensive end the team signed before last season for $51 million, has been getting first-team reps at outside linebacker opposite Nwosu. Defensive tackles Leonard Williams, Jarran Reed and Murphy (some) have been getting time at end in training camp.
Yes, this league is about pressuring the quarterback on defense. But for Seattle, they need guys who can stop the run, too. And first.
Now they face the run-minded Callahan and the Titans.
4. Can camp surprises continue surprising?
Wide receiver Laviska Shenault in kickoff returns and undrafted rookie running back George Holani from Boise State in pass blocking, rushing and catching passes gained traction toward roster spots and jobs in the Chargers game.
Shenault fielded a kickoff at the goal line. The NFL’s new kickoff rules say he could have let that go for a touchback and a Seahawks drive start at the 30. Instead, he broke through the one line of kick coverage lined up to start the kickoff at the receiving team’s 40-yard line and and returned the kick 44 yards, to the Seattle 44.
“I would never let anything go.,” Shenault said this week. “I’m back there, it’s getting returned. Best believe that.”
The offseason signee who missed much of last season on injured reserve with a high-ankle sprain in Carolina will get more chances with not letting kickoffs go in the scrimmages against the Titans.
Holani scored a touchdown on an 11-yard run. But what got Macdonald pumped was the physicality the running back showed on his block that sent wide receiver Dee Eskridge on a 22-yard run.
“The most excited I got during the game was on that sweep to Dee Eskridge. That’s the type of plays we want,” Macdonald said.
“That was big time. Art of contact on that play.”
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