Are Seahawks only team left without offensive coordinator?

Why Ryan Grubb probably wants to leave Alabama for the NFL: Seaside Joe 1800

Pop Quiz Hot Shot: Who was the first offensive coordinator in Seahawks history?

The Seattle Seahawks might be the only team remaining that doesn’t have an offensive coordinator or an expected plan at offensive coordinator. According to Mike Clay’s tracking, the Seahawks are one of only four teams that haven’t made an official announcement, along with the Moons, Saints, and Chargers.

But the Moons are rumored to be closing in on a deal with Kliff Kingsbury, who spurned the Las Vegas Raiders after he looked at the contract and realized he was signing with the Raiders. The Chargers are expected to name Greg Roman as the OC, as he was previously Jim Harbaugh’s OC for his four years with the 49ers. The Saints have unofficially hired Klint Kubiak to replace Pete Carmichael, who had held the job since 2009.

Any of these moves could be as unofficial as Kingsbury going to the Raiders (Las Vegas is said to be signing Luke Getsy as OC instead) but now the only team without an expected hire is Seattle.

What the Seahawks will do is a matter of speculation with an interesting twist that the New York Giants blocked Seattle from potentially stealing Mike Kafka in a lateral move. A Kafka hire, you say?

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The Seahawks only have three coaches who are officially announced as members of the 2024 staff: Head coach Mike Macdonald, assistant head coach Leslie Frazier, and senior defensive assistant Karl Scott, who went to the Eagles briefly but turned around and came back to Seattle.

Special Teams Coordinator Larry Izzo seems to be great at his job, but as far as I’ve heard there have been no announcements and I would expect that other than Offensive Coordinator being leaked at some point that the Seahawks will wait until a press release confirms everyone else, including if Izzo is back.

If I’ve missed any news, you can tell me in the comments:

The expected leading candidate to become OC, at least on Twitter, is Ryan Grubb, the offensive coordinator at Washington over the past two years and a coach who recently accepted a dream job opportunity at Alabama under Kalen DeBoer.

What I like about Grubb has nothing to do with football and I don’t root for the Huskies myself, it’s that he represents a shift in the coaching industry that I’ve always hoped would happen: The best coaches leave college for the NFL. I think the best coaches, same as the best players, logically belong in the NFL. Because the NCAA and the individual conferences are doing such a poor job of running the sport, it’s trending in that direction as more college coaches bolt for the pros as soon as a team calls with an offer. To some degree that includes Mike Macdonald, who could probably be running a major college program right now if he wanted to but decided to leave Michigan after one season to be the defensive coordinator of the Ravens.

You would think, “Being an NFL head coach must be harder than being the head coach of a college program” but the opposite appears to be true. NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero made a note of that last week on The Rich Eisen Show, explaining that a team like Boston College (who lost their head coach last week when he signed on to be the Packers defensive coordinator) simply can’t keep up with the rapid increase of recruiting cycles:

First you have to recruit high school players to come to your school, then you have you to recruit them (as in you have to recruit YOUR OWN PLAYERS a second time) every January when the transfer portal opens up, then you have to do it again (a third time) when the transfer portal opens for a second time in the spring…this doesn’t include recruiting players outside of your program and it doesn’t include fighting sponsors and boosters who will pay big bucks for prospects through NIL deals.

If schools like Boston College or Washington State or even to some degree Washington lands a big star, there’s no guarantee it won’t be to springboard to a bigger program for more money.

Even though Ryan Grubb is the offensive coordinator at arguably the most attractive college program in the country, where would he go next if he’s successful? He’d go to a college that’s worse than Alabama, right? If he got the job at Auburn in two years, there’s no guarantee that his priority recruits wouldn’t choose Alabama or that his best players wouldn’t transfer to Alabama.

The NFL has its own set of challenges, but not those challenges. So I’m not surprised that if the Seahawks are interested in Grubb, that Grubb would prefer to be with the Seahawks. Even if Grubb is fired in a couple of years, that’s not the worst thing in the world for his career: Getsy was fired by the Bears and he’s about to be OC of the Raiders; Kellen Moore has lost his job twice in two years and he’s the new OC of the Eagles; Liam Coen was fired by the Rams in 2023, went to Kentucky for a year, and is now OC of the Bucs; even Shane Waldron was kind of fired by the Seahawks and he’s OC of the Bears.

The list goes on and on, including Ken Dorsey, Joe Brady, Jim Bob Cooter, Mike LaFleur, Arthur Smith, Nathaniel Hackett…I mean, Kyle Shanahan was fired as OC multiple times and look where that got him.

It might be better to be FIRED by an NFL team than to be PROMOTED in the college ranks by jumping programs from OC/DC to HC at any program other than one of the top five or six in the country.

It seems like the Seahawks are very interested in Ryan Grubb and I would imagine he’s hopeful that he need not be at Alabama longer than a few weeks to get the bump that he wanted all along. But the search isn’t over. The Seahawks have requested an interview with Lions passing game coordinator Tanner Engstrand and are known to like Kafka. One report by a Giants writer is that the only reason New York is blocking the interview is out of fear of embarrassment.

Too late.

The fact that the Seahawks even tried to interview Kafka, who they had already met with multiple times, tells me that John Schneider knew enough and just wanted him to meet with Macdonald. Since Seattle can’t make it happen, that leaves the two we know about as Grubb and Engstrand.

I don’t think this should take more than a couple of days. Hopefully not 1,800.

Answer: Sam Boghosian was Seattle’s first OC, according to Pro-Football-History, running the offense for the Seahawks first two seasons as a franchise. He was also the offensive line coach and played guard at UCLA, overcoming polio as a child to play major college football and win a national championship with the Bruins. Boghosian, who is in the UCLA Hall of Fame and won two Super Bowls as an assistant coach on the Raiders for Tom Flores, died in 2020.