2 new coaches, 2 different situations

Over the past two months I’ve chuckled whenever the Washington Huskies are described as the team that played for last year’s national championship.

While this may be technically true, I don’t think anyone with any degree of familiarity with this school sees the 2023 Huskies as an accurate reference point for this year’s team.

Not only does the roster that Jedd Fisch inherited bear very little resemblance to the one Kalen DeBoer coached in 2023, it bears very little resemblance to the one he would’ve coached had he stayed at Washington. Most specifically: Four offensive linemen transferred out of Washington following DeBoer’s departure to Alabama in addition to the pair of offensive tackles who were chosen in the first round.

Any serious analysis of Washington’s performance this season has to take into account what Fisch started with, especially up front.

The same is true for Mike Macdonald with the Seahawks. Except in his case, you have to consider that the situation he was hired into is much better than your typical first-year NFL head coach.

Ian Furness reminded me of this fact during my Friday conversation with him, which is (generously) sponsored by Northwest Handling Systems. I’ll explain more of this when we go deep.

But first, we’ve got some ground to cover.

I’ve been conducting a little bit of an experiment this football season, consciously seeking to unplug myself from the online dialogue of the teams I covered. (It’s going great by the way!) I’m going to write more about that in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, here’s an essay that I wrote about my general attempt to become less online.

I love innovative formations, and Penn State pulled off an absolute doozy in its comeback against Penn State on Saturday. The tight end — Ty Warren — not only snapped the ball from the edge of the “offensive line,” but then ran down and caught the touchdown pass. It’s wild. Here’s the end zone view, which gives you an idea of not just the logistics of the play, but why it worked. It forced the defense to react — in real time — to the threat of a screen pass toward the left sideline.

I figured vacations would be MUCH easier to take facation as someone who is self-employed. After all, I’m the only one who needs to provide permission.

However, what I’ve found over the past few years is that while it’s easier for me to leave town, I’m much more prone to taking my laptop with me to do some work. As much as I want to claim a noble dedication to my craft, some of this is also because I’m a little bit scared to leave for fear I’ll be seen as lazy or neglectful. It’s easier for me to take my laptop, do a little work.

This is — I’ve decided — a bit cowardly. I’m going on vacation this week, and while I do feel slightly sheepish for doing it during football season, I also am thankful to have a little more freedom than I did when I was covering the Seahawks first for The Seattle Times and later at a Seattle sports station.

Sharon and I are in Germany as you’re reading this. We flew to Frankfurt where we rented a car and then will drive down the Romantic Road. We’re going to eat pretzels! And sausage! And sauerkraut!

To tide you over, I’m going to include some links to things I’ve written to try and wallpaper over the hole I’m leaving. Hey look! Here’s a story about Michael Oher and the hard feelings he has over how his adolscence was portrayed.

Washington is 4-3 in Jedd Fisch’s first season and the Huskies have a bye this week, which should be helpful considering the abject beating it suffered at Iowa.

And make no mistake, that was a whupping. I just think it reflects more on the situation that Fisch inherited at Washington as opposed to the coaching job he’s doing.

The Huskies offensive tackles could not handle the edge pressure from Iowa’s defense. A first-quarter injury to Maximus McCree certainly didn’t help in that regard, and the Hawkeyes were able to get pressure while rushing only four. That was going to make things tough for the Huskies in the best of circumstances.

And having an offense that struggles to score touchdowns in the red zone while also struggling to kick field goals? Well, that pretty much settled things because once Iowa had the lead, there was pretty much no way Washington was coming back.

Before the season started, I said seven wins would be an absolutely and unmitigated success. It’s hard for me to see Washington getting there at this point, though. It’s possible the Huskies won’t get to six.

But even if Washington winds up with a losing record, I think there are a lot of positives to be drawn from the job that Fisch and specifically his defensive coordinator Steve Belichick are doing.

I have some real concerns about the special teams and some questions about the development on the offensive line, but I have a positive approval rating for Fisch.

I’m having a harder time knowing where to start when it comes to evaluating Macdonald let alone coming to any conclusions.

1. Six games is entirely too short of a time span to know much of anything. This is especially true when six of those games are played in span of 11 calendar days.

2. Seattle certainly doesn’t seem any closer to competing with — let alone beating — teams serious postseason aspirations. If anything, I wonder if the Seahawks have backslid a little after implementing a new defense and a new offense in the offseason.

That second item gets to what makes it especially difficult to evaluate Macdonald. He’s a new coach and as such he is entitled to the “learning curve” or “growing pains” or whatever term you want to describe to the period of time in which a team adapts to the style and methods of a new coach.

Now for most first-year coaches, this period of adaptation will appear to be a continuation of the previous struggles. After all, NFL teams tend to only hire new head coaches because they’ve fired the previous one. They tend to fire the previous coach because things seem to have bottomed out.

For instance: Of the eight teams that made a coaching change for 2024, seven had a losing record last season. The Seahawks were the lone exception. In fact, the Seahawks had only one losing season in the past 10 years, and that was the season Russell Wilson broke his thumb.

Seattle didn’t fire Pete Carroll because the team had become bad. The Seahawks moved on from Carroll because they felt like the team was stuck being good, and wanted to get back to being great.

That has not happened yet, and if I had to guess, it’s not going to happen this year. That doesn’t mean Seattle should have kept Carroll or that Macdonald was the wrong choice, however.

It just means that it’s taking more time than everyone was hoping.

We should expect improvement from Seattle over the final 11 games of this season. This is especially true for the defense. After all, the biggest criticism of Carroll was that Seattle had been unable to get back to being a consistently average defense let alone a good one over the previous five seasons.

If the Seahawks don’t improve with a new scheme, the next question to ask is going to be about the quality of personnel that’s on hand. In other words, perhaps it wasn’t Carroll’s scheme or his defensive coaching staff that was the problem.

Now it is not at all realistic to expect Macdonald to do that overnight, but I do think it’s fair to expect this defense to improve over the final 11 games, and if it doesn’t, to be able to identify what’s missing beyond the already evident difficulties at middle linebacker.

Should the Seahawks finish with a losing record, though, I’m not going to be nearly as optimistic about their trajectory as I am about the Huskies, however, and that has everything to do with the difference in the circumstances these two coaches inherited.