If their coach has his way, the Seahawks will be doing twice as many joint practices this summer.
Mike Macdonald told reporters at the NFL’s annual offseason owners meetings in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday he wants his team to again do joint practices during training camp between preseason games in August.
Macdonald had Seattle spend days in Nashville, Tennessee, last summer for two joint practices at Titans headquarters during his rookie year as a head coach. The Seahawks and Titans then played a preseason game in Nashville to end that week.
Macdonald told reporters Tuesday he hopes to have the Seahawks doing that again this summer, twice. That would be both at the team’s training-camp home at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center in Renton, plus on the road.
The Seahawks will have two preseason games this August at Lumen Field with one preseason game away from Seattle. The league will set those preseason game dates and opponents next month. That will be part of its announcing of the 2025 full game schedule.
Last summer’s were the Seahawks’ first joint practices since 1991. Then, coach Chuck Knox took his Seahawks to Portland to scrimmage the Atlanta Falcons on a Friday night in old Civic Stadium. Portland State University sold the tickets for it.
Pete Carroll, Macdonald’s predecessor, never did joint practices. Carroll didn’t want to show any other NFL team how his Seahawks trained and practiced.
But Macdonald did joint practices routinely while as an assistant coach and defensive coordinator for John Harbaugh’s Baltimore Ravens for a decade. That was through the 2023 season; the Seahawks hired him to replace Carroll as head coach in January 2024. Those Baltimore teams often had joint practices with the nearby Washington Commanders.
Macdonald has no such close geographical fit in Seattle. The rookie coach said at the end of the joint-practice week in Tennessee last year, on which the entire franchise’s operations moved to Nashville for those days, he didn’t realize the massive undertaking and length of travel those practices would take in the middle of the preseason.
He’s likely hoping the league schedules a closer road preseason game this summer, for the joint practices to be less of a haul across the country.
Macdonald and his 2024 coaches used more of his veteran starters running more of the Seahawks’ full defense and offensive schemes in the practices and full-pads scrimmaging on consecutive days against the Titans last summer than they did in any of the three preseason games last summer.
The popularity of joint practices has increased across the league recently. Coaches like being able to show more of their full schemes without television cameras recording them for the entire NFL to then scout. They also like being able to control the amount of hitting in those practices more than in preseason games, lessening the risk of injuries to starters.
The Seahawks and Titans went starters versus starters in those joint practices in full pads that lasted lasted about two hours and 15 minutes each. That’s the only time ones on ones happened for Seattle before the 2024 regular season began.
That made the practices in Tennessee more important than any of the three preseason games for the Seahawks last summer.
“There’s an argument for that,” Seattle’s coach said during those days in Nashville.
“Why (are) we’re doing it?” Macdonald said before the practices with the Titans began last summer. “One, the science behind it: To kind of callous the team, get ready to go for the long haul. And just looking for the competition within a structured setting.
“(I) think they’ve got a great team. They got a great coaching staff. So to do it in a tight manner like right here and instead of in a game, and kind of control the environment.”
Macdonald also used the drills on consecutive days in Tennessee last summer to have his coaches and players practice assessing film from the first practice and making adjustments for the second, based on what the Titans were doing.
“Yeah, we watched yesterday’s tape … and there was a lot of room for improvement (on), really, both sides of the ball,” Macdonald said last Aug. 15 in Nashville, at the conclusion of the Seahawks’ second, latter joint practice with Tennessee.
“We had a good meeting yesterday. Guys came out focused. So it felt like we addressed most of those things.”
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