This year's Super Bowl — the actual sporting event — was so boring that the only thing that stopped me from mistaking it for a Thursday Night Football game was the lack of Amazon's awful broadcast crew. At least I didn't have to listen to Ryan Fitzpatrick, Richard Sherman, and Charissa Thompson have some cringe conversation.
To be honest, I wasn't all that excited going into it anyway. As as lifelong Peyton Manning fan, I've grown to hate both the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks for what they did to him in various Super Bowls. And as a lifelong Atlanta Falcons fan, I've grown to hate Super Bowls. That said, I was kind of secretly rooting for the Seahawks and not just because my fantasy football team was depending on it, but because the team's head coach, Mike Macdonald, is what we call here in Georgia a "Damn Good Dawg."
As a matter of fact, if it wasn't for a chance encounter at a Starbucks in Athens, Georgia, Macdonald might not have gotten to the point where is today.
Macdonald grew up in the Atlanta area and played football and baseball at Centennial High School in Roswell before heading off to the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business, where he studied finance. However, football, particularly coaching, emerged as his true passion. While in college, he coached high school ball at Cedar Shoals in Athens, where UGA is located, but he really wanted to take it up a notch.
On a 2023 appearance on the Punt and Pass podcast, he explained that "I wanted to get into college coaching, and I didn't know how."
So, every week for about two years, he'd go over to the football offices and hang out and try to be a consistent and persistent presence, hoping "eventually maybe something would pop."
It never did, but that morning at Starbucks changed everything. Macdonald said it was early, he had an 8 a.m. class, and for some reason, he was up with some spare time and decided to go to the restaurant. Of all the people in the world that could have been there, he ran into Todd Grantham.
This was in the spring of 2010 — Macdonald was on the verge of graduating — and Grantham was UGA's new defensive coordinator, having just moved here from the Dallas Cowboys. By all accounts, Grantham, who is quite intense, is not the most approachable guy, but Macdonald didn't back down. He told him who he was, explained that he'd sent a binder to him, and said that he was interested in getting a foot in the door.
"Well, come on by," Grantham replied. "Hey, you know, you can volunteer for a year if you want, and you just gotta get into grad school."
Macdonald said that's exactly what he did. He applied late and, according to him, "weaseled his way into grad school," and while taking classes, he volunteered on the field. The next year, when all of the graduate assistants left, he managed to take one of their jobs. He said those early days were "a grind," but fun. Back then, Georgia's football program was nowhere near what it's grown to be today.
The rest, as they say, is history.
After working as a graduate assistant and eventually the safeties and defensive quality control coach under Mark Richt, he moved on to the NFL. Macdonald started out as an intern for John Harbaugh's coaching staff with the Baltimore Ravens before becoming the defensive assistant, and by 2018, he was the linebackers' coach. In 2021, he became the defensive coordinator at the University of Michigan before moving back to Baltimore and serving as the defensive coordinator there, as well.
In 2024, the Seahawks chose Macdonald to replace legendary head coach Pete Carroll. Not only did he beat out some big names, but he became, at the time, the youngest head coach in NFL history — he was born in 1987. During his first season, the team finished with a 10 and seven winning record. This year, his second season, they won the Super Bowl.
On the podcast, they asked him if he ever dreamed he make it to the NFL — he was still the defensive coordinator with Baltimore at the time — and he said, "No, man, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just trying to survive Todd Grantham on a daily basis, bro."
"[Former graduate assistant and current assistant head coach at UGA] Todd Hartley and I still joke. I mean, we're, you know, breaking the copy machine daily, absolute nightmare. He had this thing called a hit chart, which is all the formations," he said of his days working for Grantham. "...just all the formations printed out with all the plays, and there's glue stick involved and cutting paper. It was like arts and crafts time, super late Sunday nights that we're not gonna get those days back, unfortunately, but we laugh about it now."
I guess all those late Sunday nights in 2010 paid off in the form of one big Sunday night in 2026. Not bad for a Georgia boy.
You can watch the entire interview here:
Full episode from @PuntandPass is below.https://t.co/N2oha0z9Cb
— Dawgs Central (@DawgsCentral_) February 9, 2026
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