Seahawks Show Growth In Week 7 Win Over Falcons

ATLANTA—The Seahawks arrived in Atlanta having lost three consecutive games, and they took the field Sunday minus two of their top three cornerbacks, one starting safety, and with a rookie making his first career start at right tackle, hardly an ideal situation to be in going into a road game against a Falcons squad that had won three in a row.

They finished their afternoon with “Sea-Hawks!” chants echoing through an otherwise almost empty Mercedes-Benz Stadium as the clock wound down on a 34-14 Seahawks victory.

If the Seahawks were supposed to be unable to overcome their recent struggles and continued injuries, well then somebody forgot to tell them, because the Seahawks responded to the first real dose of adversity in the Mike Macdonald era with their most impressive performance of the season.

“Our guys are determined,” Macdonald said. “We grew as a football team this week, and now we have to keep it going. We have to keep stacking these days, keep stacking our prep, take what we need to learn from this game and keep moving forward. It’s still early in the season, but it’s great to get back in the win column for sure.”

For the Seahawks, Sunday’s win was built on the foundation of what players and Macdonald felt was a strong week of preparation, beginning with a meeting on Monday to get to the root of what was ailing the team while also highlighting a lot of the good that had taken place on the way to a 3-3 record.

“Just proud of our guys,” Macdonald said. “We said the message after the game was, team win. I felt like we earned the win on our preparation Monday through Saturday. It was probably our best week of prep, guys were locked in. Traveling east, 10 a.m. game our time, having energy, the focus, the togetherness, all the stuff we needed in order for us to win, we did.”

Said safety Julian Love, “We had a great week of practice. It’s not lip-service. It’s being attentive to details. We had an extra day, so Monday, then Wednesday we got after it, Thursday we got after, and it all works together. We’re just trying to find our flow, we’re trying to find our identity as a team. Today was kind of an example of that—offense taking care of the ball, defense getting the ball, being stout, bend, don’t break sometimes on defense. On offense, they have those explosive plays they can make at any moment, it all worked together.

“It started with Mike and started with our leaders, just addressing it, ‘Hey, we’re here. We know what we do well, we know what we’re not doing well, let’s try to address it. But understand that we’re doing things well.’ It felt like the end of the world I know for some people, losing a few games in a row, but we do a lot of good things, so it was just correcting and trying to improve on the bad things, and then keep being the attacking style team we can be. So I really appreciate how he approached it. He said exactly what it was, and when you see that in black and white, you can attack it.”