Mike Macdonald made an impression on Seahawks edge rusher Boye Mafe months before he became Mafe’s new head coach.
The Ravens hosted the Seahawks in Week Nine of the 2023 season and they sent the NFC West club back to Seattle as 37-3 losers. Mafe said on the Green Light with Chris Long podcast that the result made “no sense” to him, particularly because of how the defense Macdonald ran in Baltimore was able to shut down “the offense we have and the tools we have” for an entire game.
Mafe has been “looking behind the curtain” since Macdonald joined the Seahawks and he told Long that he now has a fuller picture of how Macdonald was able to put such a successful unit on the field.
“I see how it’s flowing and the essence of it,” Mafe said. “He’s really one of those people, like Xs and Os, he understands it really well. He understands football really well and he understands how to utilize people, how to move people. That’s one thing I’m coming to learn, I see where it comes from and how it works.”
Mafe made a jump from three sacks as a rookie to nine sacks last year. If Macdonald cracks the code on how to best utilize him, that number could jump again in 2024.