I don’t do the Twitter X anymore. I joined it a few years ago as a means follow some folks on Seahawks Twitter who I thought were worth following, and I thought it would help push this little blog experiment out further. I also found it useful in terms of getting NFL breaking news.

I kinda sucked at the Twitter X thing, though. I’m not great at self promotion, I don’t yearn to converse/argue online with strangers, I am not an attractive twenty something female who will get likes from all the dim witted bros with my hot takes, and I am too exhausted from my day to days to camp on the app to figure out how to build follows. Homie don’t play that game.

So, I don’t Twitter anymore, and my life feels better for it.

I am no longer spending late evening hours blocking and muting strangers who impart their toxicity. I am no longer going down dark rabbit holes where Elon Musk has allowed brazen racism, sexism, anti semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, and all other wide spread forms of hatred to fill my threads. If he someday sells this platform to someone who will return it to some form of somewhat decency someday again, maybe I will join back up, but honestly, with the toxicity that exists on social media all together, maybe I will choose to continue staying away from it.

It’s not like I have ever been one to placate to the cool kids in order to gain popularity, anyway. I wasn’t this way at age 15, at age 35, and I certainly am not this type at the crusty age of 55. If you follow this blog, it is because you follow the Seattle Seahawks, and you want someone who will breakdown some nuances of the team (and football) in ways in which are relatable, and transferable to you. You might also follow along because you dig some of the quirks that filter through my typing. You might also follow because you are my sister, or someone I did a show with twenty years ago. Maybe you read regularly because you enjoy typos.

So, anyhow, yeah. I don’t do the Twitter X thingy, so I am not privy to all the knee jerk lunacy that floats out there in real time after a bad Seahawks loss under this new regime of Mike Macdonald and company. That does not mean that some of the lunatic fringe stuff doesn’t ultimately filter down my way, anyway.

I listen to a lot of Seahawk related podcasts when I can, though, and I listen to local sports radio stations throughout my day. Therefore, I listen to hosts who are active on the Elon’s dumpster fire platform, and some lunacy that gets tweeted out often gets mentioned while I am driving through crappy rush hour traffic.

Apparently, in this, there are now Seahawk fans who are done with new head coach Mike Macdonald, and are ready to see him fired, even though this team is 4-4, and in a three way tie for the division lead with nine games to go against some teams that look fairly beatable. Some fans are comparing Macdonald to former one and done Seattle coach Jim Mora Junior.

For all the racist, toxic, hate filled bullshit that Musk allows to fill up Twitter X, I am so glad I am not on it to read tweets comparing Macdonald to Mora Jr. I am really glad that I am not wasting breaths of my life scrolling through those type of threads.

Let me just simply state that I do not think Mike Macdonald, in anyway, shape, or form is anything close to Jim Mora Junior was as a young NFL head coach. Time will tell if he becomes as successful here as Pete Carroll, or Mike Holmgren, or even Chuck Knox, but I can state with total confidence that Jody Allen is not going to fire him after one season. Nor should she.

You can lose faith in him after eight up and down games, if you choose. I am not here to convince you that doubts are unwarranted. I will point out again, however, that on top of incorporating brand new schemes on both sides of the ball with a roster made of of largely Pete Carroll players, he has been working with the cheapest offensive line in football that has an unsettled position at right guard, still, and is down to their fourth string right tackle. Through these eight games, they have also faced three top Super Bowl contending teams in Buffalo, Detroit, and San Francisco.

For myself, as I look through these first eight games, the one real bummer loss to me is the game against the Giants at home. If that one really stings for you, as well, I would invite you to look at all the teams this year who have played the Detroit Lions and see how they faired the following game, such was the case for Seattle under those circumstances. The loss record for those teams is pretty glaring, and this list includes good teams, too.

The Detroit Lions are physically beating the crap out of teams on Sundays, and their type of physicality is what Mike Macdonald is striving for the Seattle Seahawks to become. This physical dominance of Detroit did not happen in year one of Dan Campbell’s regime. It took him three seasons before he built them up into a bully team, and it’s now year four for them to be looking like a championship level team.

Here, in Seattle, it took Pete Carroll three seasons for him to build Seattle into the contender he envisioned, and believe me, there were plenty of loud doubters of his on the airwaves of Seattle sports radio back during his first two years here, and into his third season. In fact, there were certain sports radio hosts that I just stopped listening to because their outward disdain for him proved too much for my ears to handle.

In fact, if you want to go further back in Seattle sports history, the start of Mike Holmgren’s career wasn’t a hot one, either. He enjoyed backdoor winning the division in his first year when the AFC West was really bad, but he did not get this team back into the playoffs again until 2003 when he finally had this team built up the way he envisioned. In fact, there were loud rumors in 2002 that Paul Allen was preparing to actually fire him, but a late season flourish of wins led by Matt Hasslebeck saved his ass, and the rest was history.

The only Seattle Seahawk coach who started hot with this team, and kept them reasonably good enough to keep his job intact was Chuck Knox in the eighties, and the closest this team got to the Super Bowl was in his first year where he got them, quite unexpectedly, to the AFC championship game. The rest of their coaches had a process of either building them up into a contender, or failing.

Jim Mora Junior is the only one who was ever one and done with this team, and the circumstances that led to that for him, are not in sniffing distance from Mike Macdonald. They are hundreds of miles away from him.

Mora had many things going on with him being the Seahawks head coach that had it very easy for Paul Allen to move on from him in favor of Pete Carroll. He had a temperament that proved cringe worthy in the press, verbally throwing his kicker under the bus after a close loss midway through the season, calling out his offensive linemen for not being tough enough as players, and just kinda coming across as someone incapable of keeping his composure as a leader men. He visibly felt weak minded under pressure, and out of his depth as a leader of alpha men.

I think he genuinely lost his locker room. It was painfully obvious that players stopped playing for him midway through the 2009 season. It wasn’t just that they were playing bad, and undisciplined, it was like they stopped playing with any effort at all.

Then you had Pete Carroll down in USC going through NCAA investigations, and facing pending sanctions, who was eying this situation in the PNW as a prime opportunity to bolt back up to the NFL again. If memory serves correct, it was his representatives who reached out to Seattle to initially gage interest in whether Paul Allen would be interested in making him their new head coach. The rest was history.

So, it was really sort of a perfect storm that led to Mora being one and done up here. It took his inability to lead this team in his first season with poise, and it took a highly successful, high profile head coach eying the opportunity to coach the organization.

Now, let us look upon Mike Macdonald. Anyone who watches his press conferences and follows his Monday morning radio show on Seattle Sports 710 can plainly see a highly articulate, bright individual who answers tough questions honestly, and always brings to them a sense of level headed poise. He might not be the plucky character that Carroll is, he might not be the hard ass that Holmgren or Knox were known to be, but neither of those things matter to me. As someone who remembers Jim Mora Junior well in his short time up here, I will take Macdonald’s straight shooting, cool headed leadership every single day of the week, and I bet most of the players inside the Seahawk locker room will, as well.

Yes, this defense has been wildly inconsistent, and yes, it is hard to watch continued blown gap assignments, and missed tackles, but let us really realize what this defense strives to be as a scheme. It yearns to be multiple in the way it unleashes its fronts, and coverages. His defenses from Baltimore and Michigan were known for the looks they showed pre snap, and then what they adjusted to post snap as a signature means to confusing quarterbacks.

Let me tell you this straight up, that is really hard to get eleven guys to consistently do together. That type of complexity takes time for players to build the chemistry needed to pull it off. It just does.

In his first year as defensive coordinator in Baltimore, that defense didn’t show positive signs of improvement until the second half of their season. In the first half, they struggled just like this unit is here in Seattle. It took half a season for his players to sync up with each other in it. It should be a reasonable expectation in Seattle that it should be similar here.

Personally, I also think it is a very slippery slope to get caught up in comparing what he wants this defense to be with what Pete Carroll had laid out with his defense here. Even when Carroll started to shift his scheme out of a basic cover three 4-3 defense into a 3-4 multiple scheme, he mandated it to be a very basic scheme that didn’t put too much on the plate of his players. One could argue that when he tried to switch to a Vic Fangio thing, he didn’t commit far enough to it, and therefore, his players were stuck inside some in-between nowhere land of what the LOB thing was, and what then defensive coordinator Clint Hurtt envisioned.

I don’t think Macdonald is interested in any sort of nowhere land for his defense to reside in. I think he knows very well that this thing will be a process up here, and he is going to have his coaches and players stay the course of honing in the fundamentals needed from the eleven players on the field to make it right together. In his mind, the dividends are worth the wait.

As for Ryan Grubb as an offensive coordinator, while my patience has been tried with him in a few of these losses, as the dust settles from the Buffalo debacle, my faith has found an ability to regain itself. I still feel like the offense is the strength of this team right now, and he has done pretty well figuring out how to play call working with a bad offensive line.

In fact, judging with what Macdonald said in his Monday press conference, it feels like they are going to lean further into opening up all the motions and tempos Grubb was known for with the Washington Huskies. That to me is good coaching because they certainly to not have the bodies up front to win by lining up man versus man and win without any window dressing and motion trickery.

I remember a time in Holmgren’s career here when he no longer had Steve Hutchinson on his offensive line, and Shaun Alexander was proving incapable of spear heading this offense as a runner, Homlgren was forced to shift out of what they were known to be as an offensive midway through a season. He opened up the pass game by using diminutive slot receiver Bobby Engram as almost a tight end over the middle of defenses, and everything opened up enough for them to stay competitive. That was good coaching.

I also remember, way back in the day, Chuck Knox being forced to de-commit to what proved to be an ineffective ground game, and he had Dave Krieg tossing the ball all over the place in a run and shoot style attack. It wasn’t Chuck’s preferred way to win games, but in that season, it was effective. That was good coaching.

For me, I love that fact that the other day, Macdonald talked about shrunk costs in terms of losing the stuff that they have been struggling to do, offensively, and leaning further into what they can do really well. This piss poor offensive line is not strong enough to go against decent defensive fronts mano y mano. If they want to score points, they are going to need to embrace finesse, and window dressing. That may not be how Macdonald wants to win, ultimately, but I love that he acknowledges that is how they are going to have to roll for now.

But for those of you out there that still have doubts about him, and wonder if Seattle made the wrong move, I think you need to look at the deeper details of what this team did to bring him up here. If anything, just look at the contract details that he agreed to when he was hired by Seattle.

Jody Allen had him signed to an unusually expensive six year contract for a first time head coach. Usually when first time NFL head coaches are given more meager three or four year deals. Mostly, they have been three year prove it deals. Three years should be the scope for new coaches to lay forth their visions.

Seattle, however, thought enough about Macdonald to give him six year contract, and it wasn’t a cheap one, either. They were actually in a bidding war with the Washington Commanders to secure his services. That should be enough to tell us how they view him, and alert us to the fact that they will probably be patient with him seeing his vision for this team through.

So, you can have all the doubts in the world about him right now, and you can pull your hair out in annoyance if his defense has problems stopping the Rams this Sunday. I suspect ownership is going to have patience with his process, and they rightly should.

The one figurehead of this organization who could ultimately be feeling some heat after the season, if this team continues to struggle would most like be general manager John Schneider who decided, yet again, to go very cheapskate on the offensive line. After all, it was he in a press conference leading up to the draft that said offensive guard is the most over spent and over drafted position in the league as he decided to give tight end Noah Fant more money in his base salary than both the starting guards on this offensive line put together.

If this team collapses because the offensive line could never get its shit together, Geno gets hurt or benched, I think it is going to fall on John more than the coaches to have to answer some very tough questions from Jody Allen. I’m not saying that he is on the chopping block as a GM, but I suspect Macdonald’s job is ultimately much safer. That’s just my hunch.

But here is another thing that we have to be real about as fans. We have no idea which of these players on this team are going to be building blocks for Macdonald as he continues to mold this thing as he would have it. On the surface, I would say that most like Charles Cross, Byron Murphy, Leonard Williams, Julian Love, JSN, Derick Hall, and probably Boye Mafe are pretty safe bets. Beyond them, I don’t see a lot of players that I am overly sure about, and yes, I realize that I am excluding high profile types such as Devon Witherspoon, DK Metcalf, K9, Geno, Tyler, and Riq Woolen.

Has Spoon and Woolen been playing elite ball in this defense, thus far? I don’t feel it, and I wish I did.

Do you want to see this team pay K9 over $10 million a year, or would you rather see that money go to a quality veteran guard (FOR ONCE), and maybe see the team draft another running back with some of his traits?

Is Geno Smith, at age 34, someone you want to see this team drop $50 million a year into around the corner, or is it maybe nearing time to finally start taking shots at quarterbacks in the draft?

I love Geno Smith’s ability to throw from the pocket, and anticipate where to throw, and move to avoid pressure, but in these games where shit goes south, I don’t love his demeanor and antics on the sidelines. I just do not. I think he has a lot to do in terms of managing his composure the way Russell Wilson, love him or not, was always able to do.

And finally, the DK situation that everyone seems to be talking about lately. I said it before and I will say it again, for me, I would prefer to keep him and see him extended. I just don’t know how this team will view him heading towards a third contract, and if some other team offers up a player of similar value at a need position, it would be tough for me to argue against it, or if they actually do get some decent draft compensation, I would get that, as well. I just don’t now if either of those things would ever materialize, and Seattle may just see more value in extending him. Of all the players I feel not so totally sure about, I kinda feel maybe he will ultimately stick around being a part of this thing.

But I digress on all of this stuff. My point is that in the pantheon of all the big names, players, and folks with job titles, I think Mike Macdonald is most likely safest to stay on this current Seahawk island. The team has invested in him.

They surely understand that he is a first time head coach, and this year is most likely going to have a growing curve with him, his staff, and these players. I would imagine that ownership would stay patient with him to the point of 2027 before they would start to raise their eyebrows, if he hasn’t gotten Seattle sniffing true championship contending status.

Time will tell if he will ascend to Carroll, Holmgren, or even Chuck Knox status here, or if he is just another shade of Dennis Erickson. I think in three years, we will have a much better clue one way, or the other.

Right now, it is totally utter nonsense to compare him to Mora Junior. It is probably not even fair to compare him to Carroll, either.

For my part, I really like him a lot as a coach, and I got faith. I think he will get this defense built up into an exciting one, and I have faith that he will insist on more resources used on his offensive line.

His stated goal for the Seattle Seahawks is to be a physical, explosive, overwhelming team to deal with for opponents. I am going to lay patient waiting for this to happen.

You do you, but I am going to find my chill zone waiting.

And I gotta say it that my life is so much happier not being active on Elon’s dumpster fire version of what was once Twitter. Feel free to join my happiness, too, if you like.

Go Hawks!