When the Seattle Seahawks officially hired Mike Macdonald as their head coach, the fan-base began familiarizing themselves with the 2023 Baltimore Ravens defense. Naturally, Macdonald was the defensive coordinator of a Baltimore unit that became the first defense in NFL history to lead the league in points allowed (16.5/game), sacks (60), and takeaways (31) last season.
Fast forward to two completed weeks of the 2024 season, and the defense has been as advertised.
Macdonald’s passing defense ranks second in the league in yards allowed (128.5) per contest. The scoring defense has also been respectable, limiting their opponents to 20 points per outing. Macdonald was asked about the evolution of his defense during Monday’s presser, and offered an intriguing answer.
“I’m not sure,” Macdonald initially told Gregg Bell when asked about comparing the 2024 Seahawks defense to the 2023 Ravens one. “We’re in chase mode, we’re doing a lot of good things defensively. I thought we covered our buts off [in coverage] yesterday [against New England]. The corners in particular deserve a ton of credit. We have to improve our man coverage in the middle of the field and out of the backfield.”
“But it’s this constant chasing of alignment of what the expectation is at all times, all 11 [players] working together. This is a different crew [from the 2023 Ravens defense] personnel wise. We have different personnel variations we can get to. I think we’re still trying to find out what the best combination of guys on the field is for us, given who’s available at a certain time. We’re in that [finding out] phase right now. There’s a lot of good on tape. We have the mentality that we need to attack this thing moving forward.”
Macdonald is flashing the ability to adapt his defensive tendencies to his personnel. The Ravens were a very different defense, both schematically and from a roster-building perspective. Macdonald’s ability to maximize defensive talent has been one of his superpowers through two weeks.
