5 most important new relationships on the Seahawks
It's not just who you know, but how well you can get to know them in one summer
How often do you start new meaningful relationships in your life? Since I got a dog six years ago and met my wife five years ago, I haven’t created many new relationships, if any.
That doesn’t include the people who read this newsletter because what we have is special: Other than people you live with, do you hear from anyone as often as your hear from Seaside Joe???
I know that I don’t reach out to anyone as often as I send you this newsletter.
The concept of continuity being important in football is an interesting one because while yes, it should make sense that familiarity helps in a sport that so desperately requires good that teammates have chemistry, we also know that constant change is a guarantee in the NFL.
So what’s actually more important:
Continuity or the ability to adapt to change better and faster than your opponents?
You probably wouldn’t argue it if I said that the Kansas City Chiefs have been the best team since 2018, but aside from the names that you know haven’t changed (Mahomes, Reid, Kelce, and Jones), the Chiefs have made seven consecutive AFC Championship games and reached the Super Bowl five times because of their unparalleled ability to lose important people, adapt, and be better than they were before.
We can all agree that the Chiefs are not the first team to have a Hall of Fame bound head coach, quarterback, skill player, and pass rusher.
The Los Angeles Rams won a Super Bowl with Matthew Stafford, Sean McVay, Cooper Kupp, and Aaron Donald. They went 5-12 the next year and have only won a single playoff game in the three years since that championship and the reason for that isn’t because they lost their stars; it’s because they couldn’t recreate the supporting cast magic around their best players despite a tremendous effort by them to do so.
Of course every franchise would love to have Hall of Fame talent in key roles like QB and HC, but I would much rather have a team that knows how to lose a star than a team that only knows how to sign one.
Seahawks 5 most important new relationships
The Seattle Seahawks are banking on continuity this season, but only on defense: 13 of their top 16 players in defensive snaps last season are back.
This is a Seahawks team that will be as reliant on developing quick chemistry between teammates and coaches as any iteration in Seattle for at least the last five years.
These could be the 5 most important new relationships on the Seahawks…I wish I could say that Mike Macdonald and Seaside Joe is one of them, but I haven’t seen his name pop up on the subscriber list yet.
1. Mike Macdonald and Klint Kubiak
The importance of the relationship between Macdonald and Kubiak is not so much in how they communicate, but in how well they mesh without needing to communicate. Can Kubiak be the head coach of the offense without needing input or interference?
This is not the first time you’ve heard that just like Pete Carroll 14 years earlier, Macdonald had to fire the team’s initial OC hire under his tenure after only one season together. And similar to Carroll needing a new offensive coordinator and new offensive line coach in 2011, those being Darrell Bevell and Tom Cable, Macdonald and John Schneider’s decision to make a change was partly due to Seattle not having the coaches they would have wanted if there was an expansive search the first time:
In 2010, it was offensive line coach Alex Gibbs retiring just before the season.
In 2024, it was Schneider waiting until the last possible minute to hire Macdonald, leaving few qualified coordinators available on the market by the time the Seahawks swung back around to Ryan Grubb.
Grubb had a chance and whether or not he would have been successful with a different NFL team is of little matter. He didn’t succeed with the Seahawks and was criticized throughout the season for not being able to do the one thing that Seattle’s offensive identity was supposed to do:
Run the ball.
Though everything always comes back to the passing game and the quarterback, particularly as it pertains to his previous stop in San Francisco with Sam Darnold, that’s what Kubiak is expected to do well as the Seahawks offensive coordinator.
In addition, and tying back to Carroll’s controversial decision to hire Cable in 2011, Seattle has basically added three new offensive line coaches:
OL coach Jon Benton
Run Game Coordinator Rick Dennison
Run Game Specialist/assistant OL coach Justin Outten
Benton is the OL coach with a history of fixing problems (read here) but Dennison and Outten both have prior experience as OL specialists, as well as being former offensive coordinators. But it all starts with the relationship between Macdonald and Kubiak even though…
It is largely a relationship that I assume is expected to give Macdonald little-to-no management over Kubiak.
Macdonald has his own set of responsibilities as Seattle’s defensive coordinator, so Kubiak’s greatest value (which Grubb couldn’t provide) is extensive career experience as a coach at the highest level. Not only did Kubiak grow up in a head coach household, he has experienced coaches working for him — lessening his need to micromanage any of those players — and Schneider has seemingly let him go buck wild as far as personnel changes…
I would mention them now, but it’s sort of the theme of the article already.
This is without a doube Kubiak’s audition to have a team of his own one day. Can he build a top-5 offense from the ground up? And can he do so without messing up Macdonald’s ability to do the same on defense?
2. Macdonald and Sam Darnold
There is no such thing as “defensive-minded” when it comes to the relationship between head coach and quarterback: Just like Pete and Russell Wilson, or Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, the Seahawks will go as far as the two most important people in the organization can take them.