Mike Macdonald: "We're Really Excited About What's To Come"

Mike Macdonald (0:03)

All right.

All right, good to see everybody. Don't have an opening statement or anything, but let's get right to it.

SPEAKER_2 (0:13)

Just now that you've had a couple of days to sort of take a step back, how would you sort of evaluate how your first season went?

Mike Macdonald (0:19)

Yeah, we've had a great, I mean, obviously what happened yesterday with moving on from Ryan took the better part of the morning, but we've had since the team meeting, having a lot of opportunities to talk to our coaches and our players and it's been really great. Just really optimistic, fired up for what's ahead of us, where the direction of our team's going. I think, yeah, obviously we want to be fighting it out in the playoffs and felt like we had a good enough team to do some damage, but we didn't earn the right to do that. So we're moving on, but we're really, man, just excited about what's to come and working through like what the off season is going to look like, making some tweaks, how do we evolve, all those things, all that stuff's ahead of us, how we build our roster, all those types of decisions, finding a new offensive coordinator. I mean, all those things, so it's an exciting time. Excited about the foundation that we've been able to lay and ready to get back to work.

SPEAKER_3 (1:20)

In your comments yesterday, you kind of mentioned the vision that you have for the offense, and maybe that didn't align with Ryan. What is your vision for the offense? What would you kind of see as that going forward that you want to get out of this new hire?

Mike Macdonald (1:30)

Well, I just, you know, I think, just, look, it's not like we weren't together on this thing the whole ride of the way. We just decided it was the right decision to make, and there's some specifics that I'll leave that to Ryan and I's conversations today and throughout the season, but we want to mirror our football team. All the things we've been talking about isn't that we felt, it's just we, isn't that we weren't doing these things on offense throughout the year. We've done a lot of great things, but we want our offense to be a physical unit and dictate terms of the defense and play complementary football and get the ball to our playmakers frequently and in space and let our quarterback play fast. So we were doing a lot of those things offensively, just decided to go in a different direction.

SPEAKER_4 (2:15)

A lot of people look at the run pass numbers and they assume that that's the reason that Mike Macdonald just wants to run more. Are they oversimplifying?

Mike Macdonald (2:22)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we can get into all the specifics and all the numbers and the ratios and there's whether or not we kind of ran it back again this year or not, there's definitely things that we want to improve on in all three phases. Be happy to answer those questions offensively on specifics, but it really just was just an alignment thing and a vision thing. And that's why we made the decision.

SPEAKER_5 (2:45)

Assuming you guys were aligned 100% in vision and alignment in February, what changed between then and now?

Mike Macdonald (2:52)

Well, I wouldn't say that it just didn't manifest itself the way that we expected and I think we kind of grew the way the offense, the direction that was going, it just wasn't the way that I wanted it to go.

SPEAKER_6 (3:08)

The Arizona game, the second one a couple of weeks ago, how close to like an ideal offensive performance was that for you guys?

Mike Macdonald (3:15)

Well, I think that game, we played complementary football. Defensively, we didn't start out the right way, offense came back and kind of answered the bell, we were able to take the ball away defensively, special teams, I thought that was one of our best games of the year. So that's what we're shooting for as a football team, is just play better complementary ball in all three phases. Offensively was great, we ran for a bunch of yards and I felt like we took care of the line of scrimmage and thought Geno played fast, but these things can kind of take different shapes of how you want it to play out. So as we look forward, and I'm sure you want to ask what we're looking for, the new coordinator and all that, it's not like, hey, I have to have A, B and C. We want to have an open mind, we want to try to find the best bit for our football team and the guys we have on offense right now.