Seattle Seahawks GM John Schneider was walking into the Harbor East Starbucks in downtown Baltimore on the morning of Jan. 30 and shot the text over to Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald as a courtesy. Nothing more. Nothing less.
“Yo, you want coffee?” Schneider wrote.
“And I’m like, ‘O.K., this is kind of more my vibe,” recalls Macdonald, who’d already interviewed with four other teams. “And I knew what coffee shop he was at because I used to live right around the corner, so I was like, .”
So imagine Schneider’s surprise when he turned around, with that text still unreturned, and saw the 36-year-old coach he was about to vet.
“Like, ” Schneider says, laughing. “No, [Panthers GM] Dan Morgan told me, . And he showed it. That was fun. He was like, He was standing right behind me, like, . And then we started chatting. Everything was really easy and clear. That’s the best way to describe it.”
The two wound up walking together from the Starbucks to the Four Seasons, where the interview would be held. The next day, Macdonald was on a flight to Seattle. The day after that, he was hired as the new head coach of a Seahawks team slamming on the accelerator after running a very detailed, methodical process right up until that week.
It’s been a long time since Seattle has been in this position. Pete Carroll debuted in the NFL’s only Pacific Northwest outpost 14 years ago. He’s being replaced by a guy exactly half his age. And over that interim, the Seahawks won at a clip they’d never won at before. Carroll made the playoffs 10 times, getting there with three different quarterbacks (Matt Hassellbeck, Russell Wilson, Geno Smith), won five NFC West crowns, two conference titles and the franchise’s only Lombardi Trophy.
So even taking the 2021 Wilson trade into account, this is a level of transition that the team hasn’t gone through in a generation. And as Schneider dug into the process of finding Carroll’s successor back in mid-January, what he was looking for was fully illustrated on that cold January morning near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
Everything was easy.
