Forget ‘every game’s the same.’ Macdonald, Seahawks see Cardinals test as a playoff game

Coby Bryant looked into his locker using the flashlight app on his phone.

The safety and his teammates dressed in the semi-dark. Glow sticks taped to the walls illuminated the locker room and bathrooms. Aside from limited power supplied by generators and emergency flood lights, the Seahawks were in the dark Wednesday inside their team facility.

“Good to be in the building. I know there’s a lot going on in our city right now with the power going out, the storm and everything. Our thoughts and prayers are with everybody,” Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said Wednesday. “Everybody hopefully stays healthy. And we appreciate everybody on the scene helping everybody out.

“We pushed some things back. There are some things we don’t have in the building. But we’re just fine.”

The “bomb cyclone” of damaging winds that ripped through Western Washington Tuesday evening left much of the team’s Virginia Mason Athletic Center in the dark, four days before the Seahawks (5-5) host the first-place Arizona Cardinals (6-4). It’s Seattle’s chance to rise to the top of the division at Lumen Field (Sunday, 1:25 p.m., channel 13).

The storm didn’t blow away the rookie head coach’s noticeably new (to Seattle) messaging around back-to-back big games.

They are the Seahawks’ chances to reverse their season. Seattle’s gone from last place in the division to a chance for first — thanks to one, massive win last weekend at San Francisco.

We know it. But the new thing is: Macdonald and his player acknowledge it.

No more “every game’s the same”

For 15 years, the Seahawks and everyone listening to them got the same, steady mantra from coach Pete Carroll: “We treat every game the same” and “This is the biggest game because it’s the next one” with “Every game is a championship opportunity.” The 72-year-old Carroll, who’d been coaching since the Nixon Administration in the early 1970s, believed that thinking was the best way to prevent his players from having peaks and valleys, inconsistency in their approaches and, ultimately, performances.

The Seahawks under Carroll won their only NFL championship with a Super Bowl win at the end of the 2013 season. They came within 1 yard of a second consecutive Lombardi Trophy the following season. They enjoyed the most sustained excellence in the franchise’s 48-year history.

It worked, until it didn’t.

Now the 37-year-old Macdonald runs the team. The league’s youngest head coach says publicly, in press conferences, exactly what you think before big games. He says what most of his players know, but would never say before.

It became obvious last week before and after the Seahawks finally beat the San Francisco 49ers for the first time in seven meetings that the Carroll every-game’s-the-same mentality was long gone.

Quarterback Geno Smith said entering the San Francisco game he took Seattle’s six-game losing streak and the fact he’d yet to beat the Niners “very personal.”

Then, following his final-drive heroics and touchdown with 12 seconds left beat the 49ers Sunday in Santa Clara, Smith said: “We knew what was at stake.”

Wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba, minutes after his second consecutive 100-yard receiving day with four huge catches from Smith late in the win at San Francisco, said: “To me, I took this like it was a playoff game.”

Wednesday, while preparing for the first of two games in three weeks against the Cardinals, Macdonald doubled down on Smith-Njigba’s thinking of last week, and on the coach’s approach of declaring this is no ordinary game.

He isn’t treating this week facing the division leaders the same as the week the Seahawks played New England in week two, in September.

“We’re treating this like a home playoff game for us,” Macdonald said of playing quarterback Kyler Murray and Arizona.

Carroll never said he was treating actual home playoff games like home playoff games.

Maconald’s intent is clear: Publicly voice the need to get the Seahawks back into a home-field advantage, to create a tangible competitive edge against the division-leading Cardinals Sunday at Lumen Field.

The mystique of Seahawks games in that stadium is gone. Seattle has lost four consecutive home games. That’s happened just one other time since the team’s new stadium opened for the 2022 season on the old Kingdome site. The other time was November into December 2008. Those Seahawks finished 4-12 in Mike Holmgren’s final season as coach.

“We need the 12s rocking. And you’re right, that’s the vision,” Macdonald said. “That’s what we’re trying to create.

“Let’s get it started this Sunday.”

Forget “every week is a championship opportunity.” Because of what the Seahawks did last week in Santa Clara, this week is their championship opportunity.

Not only do they know it, Macdonald wants everyone else to know it, too.

“Put it this way,” Seattle’s coach said, “look, we’ve earned the opportunity to be fighting for the lead in the division going into the home stretch. So, that’s the way we’re treating it. It’s very much like a playoff mindset for us at this point.

“Can’t afford to drop games. You want to have the right to play for these really important games in December and January. You’ve got to be able to execute and put yourself in that situation.

Of Sunday against Arizona: “It’s basically a December football game.”

How the players feel about the new approach

The players’ (public, anyway) reaction to their new coach’s new approach to big games?

Basically: We just work here.

DK Metcalf played for Carroll. He heard the coach’s consistent, treat-every-game-the-same talk for all of his first five NFL seasons.

Now that Metcalf’s new head coach is saying the opposite, does the Seahawks’ top wide receiver feel whiplash from the sudden change?

No.

“There are many ways to skin a cat,” Metcalf, now a relative sage 3 1/2 weeks shy of his 27th birthday, said.

“I mean, you can have a different approach but the same message. Every game is a big opportunity to get better. You have to win every game in this league, and if you want to go far and make it in the playoffs.

“But,” Metcalf said of Macdonald, “with his message right now, it is a championship week. It is a playoff game that we have to win, or if we don’t, we may be sitting at home in January.

“So, everybody has the right approach. I mean, there’s no wrong way to do it. But that’s just his way of getting the best out of his players right now.”

Carroll drafted left tackle Charles Cross in the first round and onto the Seahawks in 2022. Cross played his first two NFL seasons under the former coach’s every-game’s-the-same approach.

“The messaging is different. They say it in different ways,” Cross said while at his locker inside the darkened players’ room Wednesday. “But I feel like each game is very important. The way you attack it shouldn’t change.

“You play one game a week, so you’ve got to focus on that game and do everything you can to have everyone be in the right position to be successful.”