RENTON — Geno Smith picked a good day to miss training camp.
His Seahawks weren’t exactly grinding without him.
The Seahawks’ undisputed starting quarterback got accidentally banged and landed on the turf in practice Tuesday. Wednesday, he was inside the team’s facility getting his knee and hip “worked on,” a league source told The News Tribune.
Smith missed the seventh practice of training camp Wednesday at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center.
So what? The practice was the lightest one possible. It was a new, T-shirts-no-helmets-and-bucket-hat affair. It made their usual morning walkthroughs look like grueling grinders, by comparison.
Yet another new wrinkle from new, first-time head coach Mike Macdonald.
He calls it the team’s new “ACT” practice mode: Alignment. Communication. Technique.
Hitting? That could wait until Thursday.
The youngest NFL head man at age 37 had ground the Seahawks through the first two days of full-pads practices Monday and Tuesday. Offensive and defensive linemen banged for two days of revealing, one-on-one pass-rush drills. Cornerbacks and wide receivers went at each other on pass routes down the field. In an 11-on-11 run scrimmage Tuesday, linebacker Tyrel Dodson popped Kenneth Walker hard in the chest with a strong forearm that straightened up the lead running back on his bounce-out run off tackle.
None of that happened Wednesday.
Players wore what looked like T-shirts from an AAU pickup basketball game. The new team shirts had each player’s jersey number on the front and the back, dark blue for the offense and white for the defense.
Since Smith was missing this, backup quarterback Sam Howell and his usual center Nick Harris were with the starting offense. That was apparently to keep their pairing together. Olu Oluwatimi, Smith’s usual starting center, watched his teammates walk out the plays.
Pro Bowl cornerback Devon Witherspoon looked and sounded like he couldn’t believe day three of (supposed) full pads in training camp became a picnic on the last day of July.
Asked how much he appreciated Macdonald for putting his players in T-shirts in 80-degree whether on the third day of pads in training camp, Witherspoon laughed.
“Maaaannn, you don’t even know!” Witherspoon said, laughing.
“No, I appreciate it — a lot. It just takes stress off our bodies and we can just focus on the mental aspect. It’s cool.”
Were Witherspoon and his teammates surprised?
“Yeah, we didn’t expect this though,” he said. “You know how hard training camp is. That’s what we expected.
“Shout out to Coach Macdonald! Appreciate you, my boy!”
Wide receiver DK Metcalf is now a sage veteran in his sixth Seahawks training camp to Witherspoon’s second. Metcalf was less wowed by Macdonald’s approach Wednesday.
“I mean it was more mental, but we just still got out here and ran the plays,” Metcalf said. “But yeah, it was just a mental day. I don’t appreciate it, or hate it, or love it. It’s just another day of training camp.”
But wasn’t it different Wednesday?
“For you, yeah,” he said.
“We’re still out here in the sun running around.”
Need for better communication
Macdonald wasn’t just doing it to get more popular with his players.
The coach and his 21 new assistant coaches have a lot of work to do installing his new defense, coordinator Ryan Grubb’s new offense and special-teams coach Jay Harbaugh’s new kicking game. Macdonald said this week the defense has been having issues in camp practices with communication before and at the snap.
So the former defensive coordinator with the Baltimore Ravens is slowing down the pace of his unit’s installation.
Tuesday he introduced a new session in practice he calls “mystery situation.” Assistant head coach Leslie Frazier picks a game situation — third-and-8, fourth down, goal to go, 10 seconds left and no time out down four points, etc. — and yells it out to Macdonald, Grubb and the players. They have the 40 seconds on the normal play clock to call a play for that unexpected situation. The players have less than that time to relay the calls and get in the correct position for the correct scheme for that situation that just got sprung on them.
Wednesday in practice, Macdonald and Grubb continued to work on communication. The middle linebacker for the defense and the quarterback for the offense didn’t have helmets to hear their plays calls. Yet Macdonald and Grubb communicated with each other between and right before plays, further simulating game-day information flow.
“We’ve had a couple things that have happened in the first few days that we’ve realized, ‘Hey, we need to do better than we’ve been doing getting everybody on the same page, all three levels,’” Macdonald said. “It’s easy to say, ‘Hey I got the green dot (the middle linebacker for defense and quarterback for offense) and I’m making the calls,’ but when guys are breathing heavy, and people are coming back, and the offense is going fast, there’s a lot going on.
“It’s not an easy task.”
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