The Seattle Seahawks news that landed this morning has nothing to do with a depth chart. Mike Macdonald, sitting down for an appearance on "In Depth With Graham Bensinger," described the stretch after Seattle hired him as the most difficult of his life, and went into the personal struggles he was carrying while he did the job. That is a head coach choosing to say the quiet part out loud, on the record, in September. That is not nothing.
I don't have the full sit-down in front of me, so I'm not going to put words in his mouth about the specifics. What I can tell you is the shape of the thing he walked into. Macdonald replaced Pete Carroll, who ran that building for 14 seasons and won a Super Bowl doing it. Carroll was not a coach in Seattle. He was the weather. You don't replace weather, you just show up the next morning and try to get people to trust a new forecast. Macdonald did it at 36 years old, coming straight off a defensive coordinator job in Baltimore where his unit had been the toughest out in football.
Then you add whatever a person is carrying in his own life on top of that. New city, new payroll, new everything, and a fan base that measures every Sunday against a banner in the rafters. The football part is the part everybody sees. The rest of it, most coaches take to the grave.
Checked the almanac: Dick Vermeil walked away from the Eagles after the 1982 season and called it burnout, sat out 14 years, then came back and won a Super Bowl with the Rams. The job has always exacted this price. What's changed is that a coach in his thirties will now say so into a microphone instead of pretending the film room fixed it.
What comes next is the normal grind, which is its own kind of mercy. Seattle is in Arizona on Sunday afternoon to face the Cardinals, and Macdonald will stand on that sideline the way he has every week. The thing I'll be watching is not a stat. It's whether this opens a door for the next coach who needs to say something and doesn't think he's allowed to.