Seattle Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald doesn’t often get caught flat-footed on defense, but on Sunday he admitted he botched a call early in the second quarter against the Arizona Cardinals.
The mistake came with Arizona facing second-and-1 at the Seattle 44-yard line. Macdonald said he had the wrong defensive front on the field, and Drake Thomas stepped in to clean it up.
Thomas got the Seahawks into the correct look, then immediately made the play that turned the snap into a dead end. The fourth-year linebacker shot through a gap on the right side and dropped rookie running back Jeremiyah Love for a 3-yard loss.
“I screwed us up on that,” Macdonald said. “We were in the wrong front, and that’s the type of player Drake is - he makes things right in real time. That is some rare, rare stuff that he was able to do on that play.”
The sequence only got better for Seattle after that. Jacoby Brissett’s third-and-4 pass fell incomplete, Arizona punted, and the Cardinals didn’t cross midfield again until the closing moments of the game.
“He made the front right, so I didn’t look like an idiot, and then played with anticipation, pulled the pin and made the play,” Macdonald said. “That was a tremendous play.”
Thomas has been making those kinds of moments look routine. The undrafted 2023 linebacker won one of Seattle’s two starting jobs from Tyrice Knight early last season and has turned into a steady force for the defense.
Last year, Thomas finished the regular season with 3.5 sacks, eight passes defensed and 10 tackles for loss. According to Stathead, he was one of just three players in the NFL last season to hit all three of those marks.
He was already off to a strong start this year with a sack in Seattle’s Week 1 win over the New England Patriots, and Sunday gave him another impact play - this time after fixing his coach’s mistake and then making sure the Cardinals paid for it.
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