Seven months after Mike Macdonald sat on a stage with general manager and president of football operations John Schneider to be introduced as the head coach of the Seahawks, he was back in the Virginia Mason Athletic Center auditorium for another press conference, this time to talk about his team's upcoming season opener.

Those seven months have seen Macdonald build a coaching staff with Schneider, then go through so many firsts as a head coach—free agency, the draft, offseason workouts, and finally, training camp and the preseason—and now, finally, the real test begins when the Seahawks open their regular season Sunday against the Broncos at Lumen Field.

A lot has changed for Macdonald since that introductory press conference, including the wardrobe, with his stylish blazer-over-hoodie look replaced by a Seahawks T-shirt, and after the months of work it took to get this point, Macdonald is excited to see his team in action.

"It's here, it's time," Macdonald said. "Guys are excited, we're excited. Excited to be at home, excited to be in front of the 12s, it's going to be loud. I hope that my ears are ringing, I hope that we have trouble communicating. That's a big point of emphasis this week… It's an exciting time.

"It's come full circle being up on the podium here on the stage. I'm having flashbacks of our intro press conference. Forgot to wear my hoodie. We told everybody this week how appreciative we were of all the work that goes into it. There are so many people behind the scenes, all the players, all the support staff, everyone in the building. It's so much work just to try and get it aligned and kind of bring it in the same direction. I'm very appreciative of everybody's attitude. I think we're on our way to that, I think it's an ongoing process from here 'til eternity, hopefully. But here we are. We've got to go play a football game and go try to put our best foot forward."

Adding to the intrigue heading into the game is the fact that neither team fully knows what to expect out of the other. Yes, the Broncos have the same head coach, Sean Payton, and coordinators, Joe Lombardi on offense and Vance Joseph on defense, as last season, but they made some significant changes to the roster, and will be starting rookie Bo Nix at quarterback, making their plans on offense something of a mystery.

The Seahawks, of course, will counter will new schemes on both sides of the ball, with Macdonald bringing the defense he helped build in Baltimore to his new job, and with Ryan Grubb coming from the University of Washington where he helped oversee one of college football's most prolific offenses. So while the Seahawks hope to get off to a great start, they know that what they do Sunday won't define their season, and they also know opponents will continue to learn from what they put on tape early this season.

"You have to evolve the whole time," Macdonald said. "As the season starts and you get to the middle of the season, you kind of run out of changeups and now you're looking at 'OK, these are our tendencies now because this is what we feel like we're good at.' That's good, you should have tendencies. Good teams should have tendencies otherwise they're just playing random football. We don't want to operate like that. But, how do we keep the ball and the picture moving, keep them honest, so that they can handle all the complementary plays as well. But that's not where we're at right now, we're trying to find our fastball so to speak. But that's how it works, it's not like a given time or whatever where you're making certain decisions. It's a constant evaluation, a constant evolution."

Macdonald went through a similar process on one side of the ball in 2022 when he took over as Baltimore's defensive coordinator after one year of doing that job at Michigan, noting it requires, "a constant evolution of how we approach it, how we teach it, expectations, what we call. There are a lot of great lessons learned from those situations. Hopefully we've learned from them, and the guys go out and play great, but things are going to happen that we're going to need to fix. Whether or not that's rearing their heads again from past mistakes, but don't expect that. I think that the guys are in a great spot."

While the Seahawks will no doubt have mistakes to fix coming out of their first game and will expect to grow throughout the season, middle linebacker Tyrel Dodson is still expecting the defense to set a tone from Day 1.

"I expect it game one," Dodson said. "You've got to set a tone. We're going out there, we're trying to set a tone. Being as good as we can be, we're going to get better each week. The potential is so high for this group that I'm expecting people will laugh at my expectations. That's how much I expect from everyone and myself. So, to answer your question, yes I expect the identity to be set week one, but we've got to keep getting better each week because Week One, there's 17 weeks as everyone knows. It's a long season."

Dodson didn't want to make those lofty expectations public, not yet anyway, but said, "How we play, you're going to see the expectations. I'm kind of a lead-by-action kind of guy, so I have the expectations in my brain. I haven't verbally said the expectations to anyone. That's just my thing, what I have for this team, and hopefully they will be pretty high. It depends on how long we will go this season, because defense is going to run this team."

Because of the newness from a schematic standpoint, and because the Seahawks played their starting offense for only one series in the preseason, and their starting defense for only four series, it's impossible to know exactly what the Seahawks will look like when Sunday's game unfolds, which they hope will play to their advantage. And more than anything, Macdonald is just excited to see his team in regular-season action for the first time.

"I'm excited to see our guys go play," he said. "Any time, even in the preseason, the guys that were playing in those games I was excited to go see them do it for real. The stakes are higher obviously. You can just go down the list of everyone that's going to step on to the field. I could give you a reason on why I'm excited to see them go do their thing and go play some ball."