RENTON, Wash. – For the first time this season, the Seattle Seahawks gathered for practice at the VMAC knowing their goals for the 2024 season are no longer achievable.
If winning the NFC West and a playoff berth are off the table, coach Mike Macdonald insisted it will be business as usual as the Seahawks prepare for their season finale Sunday against the Rams at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
He made that clear two questions into his Monday meeting with media when he was asked what was the biggest controllable reason the Seahawks did not make the playoffs this season.
“Right now is not the time to diagnose all that type of stuff,” he said. “Right now is the time to, let’s go to work this week, let’s make the best of this opportunity. We’ve got one more opportunity to keep taking the field as a team. Put our best foot forward, get to 10 wins. Let’s focus on that. And then once the season’s over, which is going to happen earlier than we want, we’ll digest all that stuff and make the proper conclusions and all that type of thing.”
To that end, Macdonald said the Seahawks will play Sunday like a “normal game” and won’t sit any veteran players or do anything out of the ordinary personnel wise.
“We are going to go play to win the game,” he said.
Macdonald had hoped he’d come to work Monday and prepare for a game against the Rams that would be winner-take-all for the NFC West.
That went out the window when the Rams beat Arizona on Dec. 28 to assure that the best the Seahawks could do is tie them at 10-7. That meant the division would be decided by the strength of victory tiebreaker.
L.A. entered the weekend needing 3.5 wins to clinch the SOV tiebreaker. The Rams got four, with three coming on Sunday. Even if L.A. hadn’t picked up the wins it needed Sunday it could still have done so next week, which is why the Seahawks’ playoff odds dipped to less than 1% once the Rams beat Arizona on Saturday night.
Still, that would have been better than zero.
Macdonald watched it all, hoping for the best and getting the worst.
“This was a long weekend to digest what was going on out there,” he said.
The final blow came Sunday night when Atlanta allowed the Commanders to pull out a 30-24 overtime win and give the Rams the final win they needed.
“It wasn’t optimum, obviously,” Macdonald said. “But just like we talked about (earlier), it’s out of your control. So it’s disappointing, but you’ve got to make the best of it for the rest of the week.”
Macdonald said that was his message to the team, as well.
The Seahawks can at least say they finished with the same or better record than the rest of the NFC West with a win Sunday, indicating that they aren’t far off from where they want to be. They can get the franchise’s first 10-win season since going 12-4 in 2020, albeit needing 17 games to do so instead of 16 (the NFL switched to a 17-game schedule in 2021).
Macdonald, who is finishing up his first season as head coach, said it’s important to set a tone heading into the offseason.
A win Sunday would be the sixth in the past eight games for the Seahawks, all coming since their bye the second week of November. At that point, they were 4-5 and in last place in the NFC West.
The Seahawks won four in a row to move into first and in control of their playoff destiny.
That evaporated with the back-to-back home losses to the Packers and Vikings.
Finishing strongly with only losses to two of the better teams in the NFC – and with a better mark than the 9-8 records of the last two seasons – would make Macdonald and the rest of the organization feel a lot better heading into the offseason.
“The first thing is it’s an opportunity for us to go get to 10 wins and that’s important right now,” Macdonald said. “There’s a standard here of what we’re trying to establish and show off our football character of what type of team we are, what type of people we are, and how we’re going to play.”
A few players have some incentives or statistical markers they’d like to reach.
Quarterback Geno Smith can still earn three $2 million escalators in his contract. All are based on bettering his 2022 stats. Smith will get $2 million if the Seahawks finish with a 10th win, and get $2 million each if he gets 4,282 passing yards (he’s 185 away) and finishes with a completion percentage better than 69.75% (he’s at 70.23%).
Those would be added to a $10 million roster bonus he is due to receive on March 20. Those escalators would also increase his salary cap hit for 2025 to $44.5 million, and it’s been assumed Smith and the team are likely to work out an extension before that date. Hitting the marks would give Smith a little more bargaining power.
Second-year receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba needs five receptions to pass Tyler Lockett’s single-season team record of 100 set in 2020, while Leonard Williams needs just one sack to become the first Seahawk since Frank Clark in 2018 to get 10 or more (Clark had 13).
It may not be what the Seahawks hoped to play for this weekend, but Macdonald hopes it’s enough.
“It’s not an optimum condition on how you’re going to play, but us as a football team and an organization, we have a really high standard about how we want to play,” he said. “That’s what we’re chasing. Our football character, hopefully, gets shown to the world about what we’re about and how we operate, and let’s go be those guys that we’ve been the whole season.”