Macdonald addressed Ryan Grubb’s firing and more in his end-of-season press conference.
Another year, another offensive coordinator search for the Seattle Seahawks.
The quick exit, stage right for Ryan Grubb means that, much like his predecessor Pete Carroll, there will be a new OC for Mike Macdonald when he starts his second season as Seahawks head coach.
At his end-of-season press conference, Macdonald reiterated that the direction of the offense was not what he anticipated.
“It just didn’t manifest itself the way that we expected and I think we kind of grew the way the offense, the direction that was going, it just wasn’t the way that I wanted it to go,” Macdonald said.
Macdonald was unsurprisingly light on specifics as far as the early stages of the hiring process for the next offensive coordinator, but he provided a short but clear answer regarding the possibility of a promotion within the existing offensive staff.
“Right now, no,” Macdonald said.
The popular name thrown around as a potential in-house promotion is passing game coordinator Jake Peetz, who called plays at LSU back in 2021 and has to Sean McVay and the Los Angeles Rams through his two seasons working as a pass game specialist and offensive assistant. That seems to be merely speculation and nothing else, at this point.
While Grubb is gone, his fellow former University of Washington assistant coach Scott Huff remains Seattle’s offensive line coach. For now, Huff remains a Seahawk, but Macdonald didn’t close the door on more changes coming.
“Well, it’s tricky when you decide to bring in a new coordinator, there’s probably going to be some movement with it,” Macdonald said. “We want our new coordinator to feel like they have a lot of influence in their staff, so we might have some movement when that happens and we might not. So we will kind of go through the process and figure it out as we go.”
Macdonald did confirm that there have been some feelers put out for potential candidates, although he obviously didn’t name anyone.
“We’ve put in a couple of slips right now,” he said. “We’ll kind of let that play out.”
He previously stated that prior experience as a play-caller is not necessarily a prerequisite.
Macdonald also emphasized that he was fully involved in last year’s OC search and that he’ll once again have 100 percent involvement this year.
You can watch Macdonald’s full press conference video below: