Expectations are high for the Seattle Seahawks’ defense this season.

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The Seahawks return nearly every key contributor from a defense that evolved into a top-five unit over the second half of last season. They have a well-rounded group of talent, with eight defensive players who ranked in the top 50% of their respective position groups in Pro Football Focus grading last season – including six players in the top 25%.

And of course, they have the brilliance of 38-year-old head coach Mike Macdonald.

During his success-filled two-year run as the Baltimore Ravens’ defensive coordinator, Macdonald quickly developed a reputation as one of the brightest defensive minds in the league. And he’s only furthered that reputation in Seattle, where he transformed a unit that ranked 25th in scoring defense in 2022 and 2023 to a unit that ranked fifth over the final nine weeks of 2024.

What makes Macdonald’s defense so effective?

The 33rd Team’s Sam Monson, who previously worked for Pro Football Focus, delved into that during an appearance last week on Seattle Sports’ Bump and Stacy. Monson explained how Macdonald’s scheme is complex for opposing offenses to diagnose, without being too complex for defenders to execute.

“Some defenses like to have that complexity, but it’s very complex for the defenders playing it as well,” Monson said. “That kind of limits the effectiveness sometimes or limits the number of players that can excel within that defensive front.

“I think Mike Macdonald is very good at creating a defensive system that looks extremely complicated from the offensive point of view, but isn’t that much of a workload for the defenders mentally to play at that kind of level. It’s simplified for them to be able to make it look complex.”

One of the biggest keys to Macdonald’s scheme is positional versatility. And Macdonald has a nice canvas of versatile defenders to utilize in Seattle – with Devon Witherspoon, Julian Love, Coby Bryant and Nick Emmanwori able to roam around in the secondary and Leonard Williams capable of sliding up and down along the defensive line.

“This is a defense that likes to move people around, that likes to play multiple defensive fronts,” Monson said. “It likes to make things easy for the personnel to do that and to be able to show a lot of different looks with effectively the same personnel – and a lot of different outcomes from those looks in terms of pressure packages or dropping out from that pressure look.

“And just generally (the defense) makes things difficult for an opposing offense to diagnose and to play against it, without overloading and making it complicated for the defenders to do that.”

Listen to the full conversation with The 33rd Team’s Sam Monson at this link or in the audio player at the bottom of this story. Tune in to Bump and Stacy weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. or find the podcast on the Seattle Sports app.

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