Mike Macdonald is drawing praise as Seattle's new coach but the test starts this week vs. Denver

RENTON, Wash. (AP) — Mike Morris saw the field for all of one game because of an injury in his rookie season. Not a lot of time to make an impression on his teammates.

When word leaked out about Mike Macdonald becoming the new coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Morris’ phone erupted making him maybe the most popular player in the locker room.

“It was like, ‘Mike, did he coach you in college?’ And I was like, ‘yeah.’ I got a bunch of those text messages,” Morris recalled. “My mom and dad called me and was like ‘how do you feel about it?’ I was like, ‘I’m really excited.’”

Morris isn’t the only one excited about Macdonald and the possibilities of what could happen in his first season as the Seahawks head coach.

The franchise that employed Pete Carroll for 14 seasons and who had the oldest head coach in the league last year, went the opposite direction hiring Macdonald as the youngest coach in the league at age 37 and with no head coaching experience at any level.

Macdonald is a football nerd, in the most complimentary way. He worked his magic as a defensive coordinator at Michigan — where he coached Morris — before returning to the place where his NFL career started in Baltimore and turned the Ravens defense into one of the most successful and difficult to decipher in the league the past two seasons.

“Yeah, he’s smart. He doesn’t know how smart he is,” Seattle linebacker Tyrel Dodson said. “That guy is just so smart. I thought I was smart. He blows me out of the water.”

But running a team is far different than running a defense. And despite his relative inexperience, those around him in Seattle have been impressed thus far with how Macdonald has taken to the role.

“I just think Mike’s a great listener. He really is, he can take that information in and make decisions,” Seattle general manager John Schneider said. “It’s been really impressive to watch. Like I said, he’s a very direct communicator. He’s going to give me the information, I got it, I’m going to take it over here and I’m going to have the conversation and we’re going to move on.”

Macdonald will make his head coaching debut on Sunday when the Seahawks open at home against the Denver Broncos. He’s now the face of the franchise, although he doesn’t seek the spotlight that comes with being the youngest coach in the league.

He’d rather be in a film room or on the practice field “chasing edges,” — one of the tag phrases he’s latched onto describing what he’s trying to create with the Seahawks.

“We’re always trying to push the envelope. We want people chasing us,” Macdonald said. “So to kind of get to the mentality of we’re not copying anybody it’s going to be our style of play, it’s going to be our team, our way of doing things, never satisfied with where we’re at, no complacency. Kind of a relentless pursuit of creating the vision that we want to create. I think that kind of paints a nice picture.”

While Macdonald is more out front now as a head coach, his defensive mind is what put him on the radar of every team that was seeking a new leader this past offseason.

The Ravens led the league in fewest points allowed and sacks, and were tied for the league lead in takeaways last season. They held six teams to 10 points or fewer in the regular season, including a 37-3 thumping of the Seahawks.

Disguise and creating confusion were the keys to the success in Baltimore, and what Macdonald is trying to implement now with a Seahawks defense that ranked near the bottom of the league in nearly every category last season. The system isn’t overly complicated, but there is a high level of communication and understanding of what everyone else is doing to make the coverage disguises work.

Seattle played an overwhelmingly vanilla defense during the preseason. The first test of how successful it could be comes Sunday.

“I enjoy this defense because I think it’s fun,” Seattle safety Julian Love said. “It’s not monotonous, you’re not just getting to the post. You’re doing different things. The flip side of that you have to be on your stuff.”

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Tim Booth, The Associated Press