When the Seahawks open training camp this week, all eyes will be on Mike Macdonald.
After all, Macdonald, who became the youngest head coach in the NFL when the Seahawks hired him this offseason, is bringing one of the league’s most innovative defensive schemes with him to Seattle, and is tasked with helping get the Seahawks back to the playoffs after a rare miss last season. And oh by the way, Macdonald is also taking over for Pete Carroll, the most successful coach in franchise history.
But while the spotlight will understandably shine brightest on Macdonald, be sure to take a moment to also notice the coach who is often standing right by the Seahawks’ new leader, assistant head coach Leslie Frazier.
“Les was probably the first or second guy we called when everything went down.”
On the day he was named the ninth head coach in franchise history, Macdonald arrived at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center with his wife, Stephanie, where they were greeted in the building’s lobby by cheering team employees. The moment had a celebratory tone, but that didn’t last long, because Macdonald knew he and general manager and president of football operations John Schneider had a lot of work to do. Almost immediately after making his entrance and sharing a few enthusiastic words, Macdonald went upstairs and began working the phones. It was time to build a coaching staff.
And when it came to building that staff, Macdonald planned to cast a wide net, bringing in plenty of smart, innovative coaches with whom he’d never worked with, including offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb and defensive coordinator Aden Durde. But for one of his first and most important hires, Macdonald did reach into his past, calling longtime assistant and former Vikings head coach Leslie Frazier, with whom he had worked with while both were assistants in Baltimore. The thinking was simple, as the NFL’s youngest head coach and someone who had never been a head coach at any level, Macdonald knew he needed a trusted right hand man, someone who had seen just about everything the NFL has to offer, so when he started the process of building a coaching staff, one of his first calls was to Frazier.
“It was really important,” Macdonald said of hiring Frazier early in the process. “Les was probably the first or second guy we called when everything went down. It was a priority to work with him. I just really cherish our relationship.”
Frazier, a starting cornerback on the one of the best defenses in NFL history, the 1985 unit that helped lead the Bears to a Super Bowl title, began his coaching career by starting a football program from scratch at Trinity International University, coached in the NFL from 1999-2022 without taking a break, a stretch that included three years as the head coach of the Vikings and more than a decade as a defensive coordinator for three different teams. But after a successful six-year run as the defensive coordinator of the Bills, Frazier allowed himself a much-needed break, taking the 2023 season off despite job offers from several teams, a sabbatical, as he called it, than only lasted one season thanks to a call from Macdonald.
“I was trying to figure out how much longer I wanted to coach; I’d been doing it for a long time,” Frazier said. “After all the things that we went through with Damar Hamlin and so on, I just felt like I needed a little sabbatical. And it worked out well, it gave me a chance to get approached. My players would be calling me asking me, ‘How you doing, Coach?’ That kind of thing. And I was doing some work with the NFL Network, and I’d be talking about the players and the teams, and as time went on, I just felt like I still have more to give.”
So with multiple teams reaching out about coaching jobs, what made one of the NFL’s most respected coaches choose Seattle? It was the relationships he had with Macdonald and Schneider, as well as the opportunity to have a significant role on a young coaching staff.
“When teams did call about coming back and doing some things, the difference with the Seahawks was my relationship with Mike,” Frazier said. “There were some other places where I had some good relationships too, but when we were in Baltimore together, we had a connection there, and we had stayed in touch over the years, just encouraging one another.
“When he called me and told me he had gotten a job here, I was excited for him, and it didn’t take me long to conclude that this was the best opportunity to really make a difference and to really help the players, but help Mike as well. I think the relationship was the determining factor. And I knew a little bit about the organization. I knew about John (Schneider) being here. I’ve known John for a long time, and he’s had so much success here. So those things were going through my mind. And my wife and I just prayed about it, just thought this was the best place at this time in our life. I’m glad I came. It’s been really, really good. I really believe I made the right decision.”
“The primary part of my job is being able to support Mike.”
When Macdonald was early in his NFL career with the Ravens, Frazier joined the team as the secondary coach, which meant Macdonald spent a lot of time supporting the veteran assistant.
“He was in quality control, he was my assistant,” Frazier recalled. “And I just remember whenever I would give him job to do, it was done in the fastest time, like, man, this dude is pretty sharp. And he started helping with some of our blitz packets and some of the things we were doing there. He would always do a great job in his preparation, his research, and it didn’t take him long to figure stuff out. So I always in the back of my mind knew he had a good mind for football. Not that I necessarily thought he would accelerate to the point 36-year-old head coach—I didn’t see that—but I knew he was more than capable, just with how sharp he was and how quickly things came to him.”
Nearly a decade later, the roles have reversed and it’s Frazier’s job to help serve Macdonald, but despite the age and experience difference—Frazier is 65 and has been coaching nearly as long Macdonald has been alive—there’s no awkwardness in that role reversal.
“That’s the beauty of being here,” Frazier said. “If it were awkward, I probably wouldn’t have done it. But because of who he is and his personality—one of the things about being a good leader is being able to make people feel like they’re working with you instead of for you. And Mike has that about him where people feel like they’re working with him. That, to me, is a unique quality. Everybody has a hand in your success. It’s not just about me, the head coach. It’s all of us. And he had that quality. Even back then, he wasn’t worried about if he got credit for anything that he did. He just wanted to make sure that myself, Dean Pees and Chris Hewitt were getting their props. That’s a unique quality.”
As for the job itself, assistant head coach can mean a lot of different things on different teams depending both on the head coach and the person in that assistant role. And because of Frazier’s considerable experience, as well as Macdonald’s trust in him, this particular version of assistant head coach is a substantial role.
“The primary part of my job is being able to support Mike, and what that includes is everything that a head coach does without the head coach title,” he said. “You’re there in all the meetings, offense, defense, special teams, and you’re contributing. And in my case, Mike has given me the liberty to speak up when it comes to our offense, it comes to our defense, our special teams in any area. And obviously, to assist him with some of the decision making when it comes to our scheduling, player acquisitions, any input. I don’t know if it’s the same way everywhere, but this is what I thought it would be when he asked me to come, that he would value my input and my experience. That’s what it’s been in all areas of football, and I appreciate that.
“Because I have seen some things in my career, seen the ups and downs and you can learn from those, and it gives me a chance to help him to be successful. And I appreciate him taking advantage of it.”
All of that experience is already helping Macdonald as he gets ready for his first season as Seattle’s head coach. Macdonald has a ton of great traits as a coach, that’s why he got the job, but he also recognizes that all of this is new to him, at least as a head coach, so he’s leaning on Frazier to help with everything from how he communicates with the team to how practices are structured to just about everything else that comes with the job.
“Leslie is an elite communicator, a loyal person, a loyal coach,” Macdonald said. “Super high-character individual, representative of the type of people we want it the building. The relationships he’s been able to build with the players, I just really appreciate that—forwarding the message, things like that. Helps us with scheme as well. So it’s kind of everywhere. A resource to me personally, just direction and steering the ship, seeing around corners, which I’ve talked about in the past. Just absolutely really excited that he’s with us.”
And though Frazier has been known as a defensive coach throughout his career, he has been helping in all phases of the game.
“He’s amazing, he really is,” offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb said. “I know Mike obviously utilizes him well, but just thinking about the most random detail of a season or a training camp and just all the volumes of information experience that coach has and just the way he goes about it that he offers you guidance and lets you get to it your own way and he’s just been awesome and the support mechanism he creates and he’ll call out something that he sees like, ‘Hey, this could be a problem,’ especially from a defensive standpoint. And I love that he, he’s been awesome.”
By taking on this role late in his career, Frazier is giving Macdonald the type of resources he wishes he had sought out when he became a head coach in 2011. In fact, before he earned that job in Minnesota, Frazier was given some advice by none other than Hall of Fame coach Bill Parcells that he wishes he’d have followed.
“Bill Parcells told me this a long time ago when he was the general manager of the Dolphins at the time, and I was interviewing for the head coaching job there,” Frazier said. “He said, ‘You’re going to be the head coach in this league one day. I’m going to give you some advice. This is something that I did that helped me.’ He hired one of his former head coaches on his staff, and it really made a difference for him and helped him to deal with some of the blind spots. Going from a coordinator, to head coach, just like going from a position coach to coordinator, it’s a big jump. But in particular when you say head coach, you’re not just one side of the ball anymore. It’s an all-encompassing job, and it’s a big job.
“I wish I had listened to Coach Parcells, because to have someone in that role, man, you don’t know what you don’t know until you get in that position. You can have all these manuals, you can have all these different things you’ve read about being a head coach, but until you’re acting out that day-to-day, you can get overwhelmed, because you find out it’s a lot more than just Xs and Os. I think that’s why the turnover is so great in our league. A lot of times the person who’s put in that role, maybe they don’t always have the experience, or they don’t have the right people on the staff to really help them to see some of the errors that they can’t see. Because you just can’t have your finger and thumb on every single thing. You need someone that can help you with some of the blind spots. That’s kind of my role, but it’s a big job. It’s a big job.”
“It was maybe the best decision I ever made in my life.”
Frazier wasn’t even thinking about a coaching career in the mid-80s as he established himself as a key player on a historically great defense. In 1985, he led the Bears with six interceptions and his career appeared to be really taking off before he unfortunately tore his ACL on a punt return in Chicago’s Super Bowl victory. Today that injury would have probably been a setback that cost him perhaps a few games of the following season, but 40 years ago, an ACL injury could be, and his case was, a career-ender.
Frazier had multiple surgeries and attempted a comeback, and in fact his final tryout came with the Seahawks in 1987, leading to a decision between giving his playing career one more shot and an unlikely coaching opportunity.
“I had gotten my degree at Alcorn State, so I was thinking about using my degree in business, I looked at that, but this president of this small school in the suburbs of Chicago kept talking to me and calling me and encouraging me to come over and talk to him about coaching,” Frazier said. “I used to think about my coaches and what they went through and how thankless of a job it was. I was like, everybody talks about us, the players, and these coaches, they’re spending all these hours here getting things ready for us. So I wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted to do. Finally, I asked my wife what she thought and she said, ‘What would hurt you to go and just listen to what he has to say? See where it goes.’ So I did that. I went over and met with the president of Trinity College. And when he described what he was looking for, I felt like, if my career was going to end like it did, I thought it had to be something unique for me to do and starting a football program from scratch.
“I was 27 years old, African American in that environment. I said, this is unique. And I looked at a lot of different things, trying to figure out what the next step would be. And then finally, it took me a long time, it took me about six months to say I’m going to do it. Because there were still teams telling me that when the season was over, if I felt like I could come back and play, that they would give me an opportunity.”
Before making his final decision, Frazier flew to Seattle for a medical examination with Seahawks, and he showed enough that then coach Chuck Knox and GM Mike McCormack were ready to bring him back for a workout and a chance to sign.
“I passed the medical,” he said. “I hadn’t been able to pass the medical in Chicago. So the next step was me to do the running, run the 40 and all that stuff. So they were going to come back and get that done after I passed the medical. But on my flight back to Chicago, I just felt like in my heart that this opportunity that Trinity was presenting was unique. And I knew my knee. I didn’t have my range. Even though I had passed the medical, I knew I really couldn’t sprint. I needed to sprint to cover people. And I called my wife and I told her, ‘I think I’m going to take that job at Trinity.; And I called my agent, and he thought I was going crazy. He said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘Mike McCormick is expecting you to come back and they’re going to work you out.'”
But Frazier knew it was time, so he told his agent, “I think this is the right thing for me to do.”
So instead of attempting to continue his playing career with the Seahawks, Frazier instead launched a coaching career four decades ago that, in something of an odd, full-circle moment, has him back in Seattle, joining the Seahawks not as a cornerback looking to extend his career, but as a highly-regarded coach helping a first-time head coach settle into the next step in his career.
“I don’t regret it for a second,” Frazier said of turning down a shot at playing for the Seahawks all those years ago. “It was maybe the best decision I ever made in my life. So I’m thankful for how it worked out.”
Macdonald too, is thankful that Frazier’s career caused the two to cross paths eight years ago, leading to this reunion with the Seahawks in 2024.
“I love Leslie Frazier,” Macdonald said. “There’s a lot of people in this world, especially football world, that love that man. His reputation is well-earned. Man of faith, man of character, integrity. He’s a leader, servant-leader. A lead communicator. I always go back to that, but he’s just got a way of kind of getting people’s guard down when he wants to give them a message. I really appreciate that about him. I trust him 100 percent all the time. I’m just really happy he’s a Seahawk.”
