Five questions for new coach Mike Macdonald’s nearly all-new Seahawks training camp

For more than a decade, each Seahawks training camp was essentially the same.

Lots of music. Lots of fans. Same system. Same eagles nesting in tall trees next to the field.

And the same formats to practices. Not a lot of hitting. No tackling. Not much change from one summer to the next.

So much for all that.

Other than the site in Renton (the same for 16 years), the Seahawks’ 2024 training camp that begins Wednesday at the team’s Virginia Mason Athletic Center along Lake Washington will be all new. And almost all different.

New coach Mike Macdonald has replaced Pete Carroll, who had led the franchise for 14 NFL seasons until Seattle fired him in January. Macdonald, the league’s youngest coach, turned 37 late last month. He and his staff of 21 new assistant coaches will be installing new offensive, defensive and special-teams playbooks and systems in the six weeks of practices between now and Seattle’s season opener Sept. 8 against Denver.

Macdonald is installing a new defense. It switches players’ positions and their roles just before and after the snap on a Seahawks D that ranked 30th in the 32-team league last season. The former defensive coordinator for the Baltimore Ravens will be having Seattle’s linemen standing and moving. Safeties and linebackers will be disguising their alignments. They will be moving in and out of blitz modes. That is, after they get down the new base concepts during training camp.

New offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb is installing the offense he used to push Washington Huskies into college football’s national championship game in January. Seahawks quarterback Geno Smith and fellow starters, young and old, are studying UW game film to learn how Grubb’s formations and plays work in games.

They will begin using those in exhibitions that the Seahawks begin playing Aug. 10 at the Los Angeles Chargers.

Fans will be seeing less of their Seahawks in Macdonald’s camp than they did in Carroll’s. The team has 10 practices open to the public from Wednesday through Aug. 8. That’s down from 12 last summer. Some of that is because Macdonald’s Seahawks are doing something else Carroll’s never did. They are leaving camp to have two joint practices with the Titans in Tennessee, Aug. 14 and 15. Seattle and Tennessee play their second preseason game Aug. 17 in Nashville. The Seahawks are also telling fans who attend practices in training camp they cannot use their phones to take pictures or videos of practices this summer.

Macdonald has even changed what the players wear to practice. Instead of the basic, block-color practice jerseys of the past, the 2024 Seahawks are wearing their game uniforms in practices. The offense is wearing their home navy blues, with all the green and white trim. The defense is wearing Seattle’s road, white game uniforms. Smith’s and the quarterbacks’ no-contact jerseys are the royal-blue game throwbacks from the 1990s and before.

“It’s something that they did in Baltimore,” Macdonald said. “The thinking behind it is, we’re trying to make practice as much like a game as possible. So how we dress, all the details, where we stand, how we operate, how we coach them up timing-wise. We want the guys feeling like they’re out there playing.”

All these changes are what team chair Jody Allen and vice chair Bert Kolde wanted. In January they chose general manager John Schneider’s vision and not Carroll’s of how to improve from consecutive 9-8 seasons, and missing the playoffs for just the third time in 12 years last season.

Here are the five questions I will be seeking answers to throughout Macdonald’s first training camp with Seattle:

1. How is Mike Macdonald making the Seahawks defense better?

Macdonald’s system is based upon deception and change. The movement pre- and even post-snap seeks to confuse offenses.

At times, camp practices might look like a shell game on grass. Jarran Reed might be a nose tackle and Dre’Mont Jones an end on one play. The next, Reed could be between the offensive guard and tackle. Jones could be standing up as a rush outside linebacker, and Leonard Williams might have moved inside over the center. Williams could be an end on the next play.

“They kind of have me playing six different spots,” Williams said, “all the way from the zero (technique, over the center) all the way out on pretty much both sides.”

It’s going to take weeks of camp practices for the players to get all this multiplicity and movement at the call of a single word before snaps down. Will all the multiplicity improve what was the league’s 31st-ranked run defense last season? We won’t know that until the games get real.

2. Will Macdonald have Seahawks starters play more in preseason games?

It’s reasonable to presume he will.

Smith, wide receivers DK Metcalf, the still-to-be-determined offensive line, Williams and the defense, they need game reps to truly see and feel how the new schemes work. Better to learn that when the games don’t count.

Seattle has three preseason games, at the Chargers in 2-1/2 weeks, the one at Tennessee Aug. 17 and home against Cleveland Aug. 24. Macdonald isn’t about to announce how much his starters are going to play in those exhibitions anytime soon. But don’t be surprised if Smith and the starters play more than Seattle’s regulars usually do in August.

3. Who is starting on the right side of the offensive line?

For all Grubb intends to install and create, his new Seahawks offense will only work if he and new OL coach Scott Huff get Seattle’s line improved.

I’ll be watching closely in camp to see who’s going to be on it.

The left side is set. Tackle Charles Cross is the only sure thing on the line for the next two seasons; he has this year and next remaining on his rookie contract, and potentially a fifth-year option for 2026. He was the team’s first-round draft choice in 2022. Left guard Laken Tomlinson signed this offseason for one year. He made the Pro Bowl at that position for San Francisco in 2021.

Center Olu Oluwatimi, a fifth-round pick last year, enters camp with the inside track to winning the full-time center job for the first time. Monday, ESPN reported the Seahawks are hosting free-agent center and guard Connor Williams on a visit Tuesday. Williams, 27, started four seasons for the Dallas Cowboys at left guard. The second-round pick in 2018 out of Texas started the last two seasons for the Miami Dolphins at center. He tore his ACL in December playing for Miami. So his physical examinations would be of prime interest to the Seahawks.

Seattle’s most open starting job of camp is at right guard. Anthony Bradford, who started 10 games last season as a rookie, missed all but the final day of offseason practices with an injured ankle. While the fourth-round pick in 2023 from LSU was out this spring, last year waiver pickup McClendon Curtis was the starting right guard.

Christian Haynes might end up starting the opener there. Many scouts saw the rookie third-round pick from Connecticut as one of the more NFL-ready guards in this draft class. Macdonald is looking forward to training camp’s first full-pads practices next week to see Haynes truly join the competition to start.

“I think Christian’s game is when pads are on, when he’s moving people, getting to the next level, things like that,” Macdonald said last month at the team’s minicamp. “Right now it’s hard to feel the offensive line pushing the pile, moving the line of scrimmage. Hopefully we see that when pads come on.”

Starting right tackle Abe Lucas begins training camp on the physically-unable-to-perform list. The third-year veteran from Washington State has been Seattle’s most consistent blocker over the last two seasons. Yet he hasn’t been in a practice since offseason knee surgery to fix what Carroll said last year was a “chronic” condition. The team hopes Lucas is practicing in August, but that’s no certainty.

Raiqwon O’Neal was starting for Lucas in OTAs and minicamp. George Fant signed back with Seattle this offseason to be a swing, backup tackle. He’ll compete in camp with O’Neal and rookie sixth-round picks Sataoa Laumea and Mike Jerrell at right tackle while Lucas remains out.

Fant, 32, entered the NFL in 2016 as an unsigned college basketball player the Seahawks made into a starting pro tackle.

3. What is Ryan Grubb’s offense looking like so far in the NFL?

More run than he was known for at UW.

The new offensive coordinator in his first NFL job seeks to do for Seattle much of what Macdonald wants to do on defense. Grubb wants to confuse the middle of defenses, particularly the safeties, with formations, pre-snap motion and layered pass patterns with Metcalf, Tyler Lockett, Jaxon Smith-Njigba and tight end Noah Fant. He is trying to force safeties into choosing routes crossing in front of and running at them. That often freed UW’s receivers deep outside past the preoccupied safeties for passes from Michael Penix Jr.

All that depends on a strong running game with backs Kenneth Walker and Zach Charbonnet. Grubb wants to force defenses to honor his multiple, play-action pass game.

And, again, all that depends on having a strong offensive line that can run and pass block well.

“(We) are going to be a physical team in Seattle. And over the years, that’s something that we’ve certainly done,” Grubb said. “When the components all matched up, we ran the ball very effectively (at Washington with 1,100-yard back Dillon Johnson, at Fresno State), and I look forward to it. I think that when you have an established run game, it makes calling those other plays, the auxiliary plays off of it, a lot easier, honestly.

“It’s when you don’t have the presence of a run game that things can get really tricky.”

4. What are the futures of Geno Smith and Sam Howell at quarterback?

Training camp and the three preseason games might determine that.

If this season goes as the Seahawks hope and plan, Smith will make all the starts and take all the meaningful snaps. That is, unless the Pro Bowl passer the last two seasons gets hurt or is suddenly among the worst-performing QBs in the league by midseason.

That would mean training camp and the preseason games are the chances for Howell, the Washington Commanders’ 2023 starter Seattle acquired in a trade this spring, to impress Seahawks coaches. For 2025 and beyond.

When The News Tribune asked general manager John Schneider after he did not draft a quarterback for the 13th time in 15 years what the longer-term plan is at the position for beyond 2025, Schneider said May 1: “Are you being serious right now? That’s a serious question: ‘What’s your long-term plan?’

“Well, we just traded to get Sam Howell. He’s got two years left on his (rookie) contract. He’s, what, two years younger than a lot of these guys (quarterbacks in this year’s draft class). Geno’s here. We have a really cool room right now.

“We will continue to work it. So, we’ll see where it goes. We are always looking at that position,” Schneider said. “I can’t tell you what our long-term plan is, because I honestly don’t know.

“But Sam is a huge part of it, because we made a major trade to get Sam before we got here (to this draft).”

5. How are they using Devon Witherspoon and how does that affect the rest of the defense?

Witherspoon was a starting left cornerback who moved inside to nickel against slot receivers last season as Seattle’s rookie fifth pick in the draft last year.

In OTAs and minicamp this spring, Macdonald had Witherspoon exclusively as a nickel back inside during all 11-on-11 scrimmaging.

Macdonald had Baltimore in nickel 79% of the time last year. That worked out OK; the Ravens became the first team to lead the NFL in fewest points allowed, turnovers and sacks last season.

That could mean new weakside inside linebacker Jerome Baker plays perhaps 20% of snaps. Typically, when NFL teams use nickel with a fifth defensive back, they take a linebacker off the field. Macdonald has said he plans to have Tyrel Dodson, the other inside linebacker Seattle signed to a one-year contract with Baker this offseason, be the defense’s signal caller and middle linebacker. He replaces departed Bobby Wagner (now with the Commanders) in that role.

Baker (wrist surgery) and Dodson (undisclosed injury) are beginning training camp on the physically-unable-to-perform list. They can come off that at any time during the preseason.