The man, the inspiration, at ‘the tip of the spear’ to these Super Bowl Seahawks
Mike Macdonald coaches his Super Bowl Seahawks with a military ethos.
“If you’re walkin’, you’re WRONG!” he bellowed at his players at one, dragging point of training camp last summer.
The 38-year-old Macdonald is in his second season as Seattle’s coach. This is his first head-coaching job at any level of football. He talks often about “chasing edges.” The Seahawks wear those words on shirts.
Macdonald talks of how important it is his players know his clear “commander’s intent.” He wants guys and certain position groups to know they are “the tip of the spear” for how he wants the team to operate.
He calls his best players — Pro Bowl cornerback Devon Witherspoon, do-it-all rookie safety/linebacker Nick Emmanwori — “force multipliers.” Gen. Colin Powell had among his 13 rules for leadership: “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” Mike Macdonald lives and coaches that way.
The credo these Seahawks have embraced so much on this run to Super Bowl 60 Sunday against the New England Patriots they made into T-shirts of it, ones they wear all over the locker room and team facility back in Renton: “M.O.B.”: Mission Over Bulls***.”
“There’s this joke that we always say ‘Hooah!’ when he says something,” veteran Pro Bowl defensive lineman Leonard Williams said in the summer of 2024, when Macdonald was in the first months of being the NFL’s youngest head coach.
“That’s an Army thing.”
Why does Macdonald coach his Seahawks this way?
He was born to.
“My dad is obviously really proud of going to West Point — as he should be. I’m proud that he went there,” Macdonald said Monday night, at his podium amid the chaos that is the Super Bowl media night/free-for-all at the San Jose Convention Center.
Hugh Macdonald, Mike’s father, is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, Class of 1971. He played for Army’s lightweight (now called “sprint”) football team while earning a bachelor’s of science degree in applied science.
Upon graduation four years before the end of our country’s combat operations in Vietnam, Hugh Macdonald was an engineer officer.
“In his class, the number for engineer officers who went directly to Vietnam (after officer basic training) was seven,” Mike Macdonald told The News Tribune in the summer of 2024. “My dad was, like, 50. He got stationed in Germany.”
Lieutenant Hugh Macdonald found Europe still widely wrecked from World War II that had ended 27 years earlier. The coach’s dad was part of the American military’s engineering efforts to rebuild parts of Western Europe’s post-War infrastructure.
That was a decade and a half before Mike was born, on June 26, 1987, in Boston.
By then, his father had served his time as an Army officer and was in his business career. That career took the family of Mike and two older sisters, Kate and Maggie, to Georgia. That’s where Mike went to grade school. Then he was a baseball infielder, a golfer and an undersized football linebacker at Centennial High School in Roswell, about 20 minutes north of Atlanta.
“I grew up on West Point stories, from Plebe Summer (basic training for new, freshman cadets) to getting in formation. And when he went overseas the first time, what that was like,” Macdonald said Monday night at the Super Bowl.
“He shows up as a young lieutenant over in Germany, all of a sudden responsible for X amount of people. Guys that have been in it for a long time, and (him) having the humility to let them know that he doesn’t know, and he’s there to help him out.
“What that must have felt like in that moment.
“There’s a lot of those. Those are the stories we went to bed at night (with), every night. “Pretty cool.”
Mike Macdonald’s path to the Super Bowl
The coach smiled as he remembered Monday night.
He said: “I don’t know if that made me want to go to West Point, or not.”
It did not.
Mike Macdonald went to his home-state University of Georgia. He became a high-school football coach for the freshman team at Cedar Shoals High School in 2008, while still an undergrad across town in Athens, at Georgia.
He was a member of the prestigious, 30-person cohort at UGA’s Leonard Leadership Scholars Program within the Terry College of Business. While excelling with classmates now on Wall Street, college undergrad Mike Macdonald also made coaching binders. He’d written all kinds of original Xs and Os concepts in them.
He hung out at the Starbucks just off campus that he knew the Georgia Bulldogs’ football coaches frequented on their way to the athletics complex each morning. At the Starbucks, and inside the Georgia football building, uninvited, Macdonald handed his binders, unsolicited, to Georgia’s football coaches.
He did this for months, past semesters. One coach finally accepted one of his binders. He was intrigued by Macdonald’s football aptitude, and his chutzpah. Georgia Football eventually hired Macdonald to be an unpaid graduate assistant.
And that’s how Mike Macdonald became a football coach, one now leading a team into the biggest game in the world on Sunday up the road in Santa Clara.
Macdonald brings Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, some of our nation’s most driven, disciplined, accomplished and tested people, into Seahawks headquarters to talk to the players. He cancels practices to take his team to Joint Base Lewis-McChord. In June 2024, months into replacing fired Pete Carroll as Seahawks coach, he took the players to visit with soldiers in the 1-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team at JBLM.
“Obviously, I have a ton of respect for my dad. A lot of my family were also military members, and served in wars. So you are exposed to it your whole life,” Macdonald said Monday night.
“And as you learn more about it, those are the people that are protecting our freedom on a daily basis. Put it on the line for us. And they also happen to be some of the best operating teams in the world.
“Why wouldn’t you want your team to embody some of those principles?
“To me, it’s kind of like low-hanging fruit. Why would you not want to do that?”
So The News Tribune asked him at the Super Bowl: Why didn’t he go to West Point and follow his father and his path he so obviously reveres?
“Honestly, Gregg, at the end of the day, my heart wasn’t in it,” the Seahawks’ earnest, real coach said.
“And if I went, I would be taking someone else’s spot that deserved to be there.
“That’s why I didn’t go.”
Mike Macdonald’s dad is in need
Hugh Macdonald got a master’s degree from Boston University, in the city his son Mike was born in the summer of 1987. In Hugh Macdonald’s post-Army career he founded SalesScope, Inc., a business-consulting company 25 years ago, when Mike was in middle school.
Now h’e’s in a test bigger and more important than the Super Bowl his son is coaching in on Sunday.
Hugh Macdonald developed hypertension. Then in 2024 doctors diagnosed him with kidney disease. It’s accelerated. Early in 2025, he learned he needed dialysis. He needs a kidney transplant. Hugh now undergoes dialysis three times a week while his family continues the search for a donor.
He is on donor wait lists in Atlanta and Seattle. Macdonald was flying back to Georgia before this season, to be with the man who has inspired how Mike Macdonald leads and coaches these Seahawks.
Mike Macdonald says his mother “has taught me if you’re going to do something, you’d better do it right.”
He says his father instilled in him “integrity, humility.
“And determination.”
This story was originally published February 3, 2026 at 9:23 AM with the headline "The man, the inspiration, at ‘the tip of the spear’ to these Super Bowl Seahawks."
