The 2025 Seahawks look to escape the NFL’s middle class

Published 9:30 am Tuesday, September 2, 2025

RENTON — In his first news conference after the Seattle Seahawks finalized their initial 53-man roster, Mike Macdonald said he didn’t care about the state of his team relative to its NFC West rivals.

“I just care where we’re at,” the second-year head coach said.

On one hand, a singular focus on his team, which opens the regular season at home Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers, is understandable. Macdonald is both the head coach and defensive play caller, and the latter job eats up a great deal of his bandwidth. He can’t afford to look too far into the future or make big-picture declarations about Seattle’s place in the leaguewide landscape.

On the other hand, the Seahawks’ goal of contending for a championship begins with winning the division, which Seattle hasn’t done since 2020. A wild-card team can make a run to the big dance — Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers were the last squad to do so — but it’s more likely than not that a division winner will represent the conference in the Super Bowl. Last year’s Seahawks, who went 10-7, finished second in the NFC West but didn’t make the playoffs.

Last season, despite their best efforts, Macdonald and general manager John Schneider charted a different course to the same end that has frustrated the front office and fan base for the better part of the last decade: competing but not contending. Seattle hasn’t won fewer than seven games since 2009. But the team hasn’t won a playoff game since 2019 and hasn’t advanced beyond the divisional round since 2014.

The Seahawks are currently mired in mediocrity. They’re far from bottom dwellers, but they’re also not in the top tier of teams in the running to hoist the Lombardi Trophy. Life in the NFL’s middle class is good enough to prevent an ownership group from tearing things down to the studs, but it’s also just frustrating enough for the fans to push for significant changes. Swapping Pete Carroll for Macdonald was that change.

Year 1 with Macdonald went about as expected. The man who coordinated the league’s No. 1 defense in 2023 in Baltimore came to town and fixed that side of the ball. The offense, however, wasn’t fixed and in many ways regressed (special teams was also more of an issue than usual). Macdonald took over a nine-win team and did one game better. All told, Macdonald’s first season was adequate.

The glass-half-full outlook is that the 38-year-old coach’s debut gave Seattle something to build on, and most of the renovations have been focused on the side of the ball that needed it most. This offseason, Seattle overhauled its offensive staff, changed quarterbacks, jettisoned two of its top three receivers, cut its No. 1 tight end and used nine of its 11 draft picks on offensive players.

Schneider and Macdonald reconfigured the Seahawks’ setup, coaching staff included, and the 2025 season should be when the team takes the next step. This is why Macdonald was asked about his team’s ability to compete in the NFC West. Macdonald may not care, but it matters.

Sean McVay’s Rams and Kyle Shanahan’s 49ers have accounted for seven of eight division titles since they became head coaches in 2017. They’ve combined to win the conference four times. Once the tone-setters out west, the Seahawks have spent much of the last decade reacting to the schematic innovations by McVay and Shanahan, recently voted the league’s two best offensive play callers by coaches and executives in a poll conducted by The Athletic.

The Athletic’s betting model that calculates an expected win total for every team projects the 49ers (10.4 wins) to take the NFC West crown, followed by the Rams (9.7), Cardinals (8.7) and Seahawks (8.6). Even if one were to quibble with the projected order, the model is likely correct in that the division will be highly competitive and may come down to the wire.

The new-look Seahawks believe they have what it takes to come out on top. They just need to prove it.

Seattle finally has an established offensive identity for the first time since 2018, when Brian Schottenheimer brought in a run-first attitude he had previously implemented with success at his prior stops. Their identity shifted over the next two seasons, and Schottenheimer was fired following the 2020 season over philosophical differences with the head coach. Seattle’s next two play callers, Shane Waldron and Ryan Grubb, were first-time play callers — and it showed.

Offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak has done this before. The system he runs has worked before in multiple places. No system guarantees an offense will be elite; players still must bring the X’s and O’s to life. But Seattle finally having a better understanding of what it wants to accomplish should make a drastic difference.

For years, the Seahawks have lacked two critical components required of a successful operation: the ability to problem-solve and a reliable process. In theory, neither of these should sink the ship in 2025.

“The intent behind everything that we do is a pivotal piece of how we operate,” wide receiver Cooper Kupp said, adding that the coaching staff teaches the “why” behind the plays. “It’s the core of what makes plays good. If you’re out there just running lines on a piece of paper, you’re not going to be very good. You’ve got to be able to solve problems, and part of solving problems is understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

There wasn’t as much ambiguity about Macdonald’s system last year, but the players naturally have a stronger grasp of the inner workings after a full year of playing in it. Aside from replacing edge rusher Dre’Mont Jones with DeMarcus Lawrence and safety Rayshawn Jenkins with second-round rookie Nick Emmanwori, the lineup is largely the same. They’ll also have inside linebacker Ernest Jones IV, the defensive signal caller, for a full season.

On defense, having more clarity is the “main thing” that has helped them take a step forward, safety Julian Love said.

“Clarity in how we want to play, how we want to meet, clarity of a standard,” Love, now in his third season with Seattle, said. “It’s like shooting at a basketball rim with a target. When you have that goal set, it’s easy to hit.”

Love said they are better equipped to handle the ebbs and flows of the regular season. Seattle started 3-0 last season and had the best defense in the league at the time. They were winning but didn’t quite know the true how or why behind their success (it helped that Seattle faced three bottom-10 offenses). They struggled over the next several weeks and had to shuffle the roster to find their footing after the bye week.

“We were just winning off of talent alone in those first few games,” Love said. Now, Love said, no matter the opponent, the week or the result, “We’re going to attack it the same way. It’s comforting knowing that win or lose, we know the process of what we want to do.”

All this sets up for the 2025 season to be a true evaluation of the Schneider-Macdonald pairing and whether it can take Seattle over the top. Macdonald is signed through the 2029 season, and Schneider just signed an extension that will keep him around through 2031, so it’s not as if their seats are warm. But team owner Jody Allen made those investments because, as Schneider said, “She has very strong faith in what we’re doing.” Now it’s time for Schneider and Macdonald to prove her right.

Several players and coaches remain from the Carroll era, but by and large, this is a new team. The one-year free trial has expired, and now the changes need to pay dividends.

The 2025 Seahawks are not in Super-Bowl-or-bust territory, of course. It’s more along the lines of, for lack of a catchier phrase, win the West or wonder whether this is working.

That’s step 1, at least. The next phase of the evaluation will begin once that box is checked.