Celebrating Mike Macdonald's birthday through growth in play calls

Seattle Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald celebrated his 39th birthday on Friday, so we at Seahawks Wire wanted to find a good way to wish him a happy belated birthday. Since his last birthday, he’s gone from a first-year head coach who blends into the crowd to a historically young and dominant Super Bowl winner. We decided it would be fun to look at the growth these two play calls showed him undergoing, from a football coach with a very common name to a network television headliner.

This seemed to work astonishingly well, both at the time and in retrospect. But to have it work twice in the span of a quarter, in carbon copy fashion? You call the plays you know you can execute, and there’s no better example than this. You can imagine how excited they were on the practice fields when they saw how well this would work.

This one turned a slow, 3-0 halftime lead into an exclamatory domination of an unworthy opponent. When they faced Max Brosmer, they learned how to show force in a way that built into the Super Bowl run the next 60-70 days. It’s fun to look back and realize this momentum was the reason they didn’t lose a game after this point.