This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.
One day last year, John Schneider, the general manager and architect of the Seattle Seahawks, called Michael Gervais, a sport and performance psychologist who had worked with the team under former coach Pete Carroll.
Schneider had an idea for a reunion. The pitch was short.
In Mike Macdonald, Schneider believed the Seahawks possessed a special coach, a young defensive maestro who had won 10 games in 2024, his first season on the job. He also believed that Gervais could help Macdonald establish a culture in the young coach’s image.
Across 15 seasons in Seattle, Schneider had come to believe in the “Hedgehog Concept,” an idea developed by management researcher and author Jim Collins. In his influential book, “Good to Great,” Collins had cited a famous 1953 essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who used an ancient Greek parable to divide the world into foxes and hedgehogs.
The fox knows many things. But the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Collins argued that the companies that made the leap from good to great were hedgehogs — they knew one big thing — and for most of Schneider’s tenure in Seattle, it was easy to identify the Seahawks’ one thing.
It was culture. Under the leadership of Carroll and Schneider, the Seahawks had grown into one of the most influential franchises in professional sports, at the vanguard of a sea change toward positive coaching and mental performance, a hub of energy and competitiveness.
Carroll had hired Gervais, who possessed a Ph.D. and an expertise in high-performance psychology. Schneider had targeted players who were equal parts “smart, tough, reliable (and) swaggy.” The formula resulted in two trips to the Super Bowl, including a championship in the 2013 season and an iconic moniker for the team’s defense: “The Legion of Boom.” Yet by early 2024, Carroll was gone, the “Boomers” were all but retired, and Gervais was focusing on other projects. Which made the call from Schneider even more intriguing.
Not long after, Gervais met Macdonald, and the young coach outlined one of his core principles, a mission of “chasing edges” in all corners of the organization.
“That ‘edge’ is so rich in content and so rich in emotional experience that it takes a lot to get to that edge every day,” Gervais said. “And so that’s what we worked on.”
Less than a year later, on a Sunday night in northern California, the Seahawks became champions once again, defeating the New England Patriots 29-13 in Super Bowl LX. It was a title built on another devastating defense with a memorable nickname (“The Dark Side“), a quarterback experiencing the ultimate redemption, and a head coach who, at 38, became the third youngest to lift the Lombardi Trophy.
But it was also a story about culture — one both old and new. To reach the pinnacle, the Seahawks did something more challenging than win a football game: They tapped into the past to create their own legacy.
When Macdonald interviewed to become the head coach of the Seahawks, Jody Allen, the team’s controlling owner, emphasized a clear priority. The Seahawks had moved on from Carroll — whose tenure had stagnated into a series of .500-ish seasons — and the team sought fresh energy, new ideas and a reboot. But Allen wanted to keep the culture that had been built under Carroll and Schneider, the ethos that permeated the building.
It was the kind of pivotal moment that could trip up the most astute founder or CEO — the kind that management experts call the allure of the outsider. It would have been easy for Allen to bet big on change, to clean house and move toward a new generation of Seahawks football.
It also would have been precarious. In 2019, a group of management professors and researchers from Penn State and the University of Georgia published a paper in the Strategic Management Journal that showed that “outsider CEOs” were riskier than internal hires. It wasn’t that they were worse, necessarily. It was that the data indicated they were prone to extreme and unpredictable outcomes — occasionally moving the needle, but just as often failing spectacularly. The “Insider CEO,” meanwhile, was safer and steadier — and often uninspiring, understanding the familiar terrain but often churning out neutral results.
Allen took a third path. She retained Schneider, promoting him to president of football operations, and then issued a directive to Macdonald.
Inject new ideas but build on the culture.
“That’s something that Jody and John felt strongly about,” Macdonald said. “They wanted (it) to carry over into our team. And I think that’s really cool. Our spirit is kind of unique to us.”
Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald and general manager John Schneider celebrate after the NFC Championship game. (Photo by Jane Gershovich / Getty Images)
It was harder than it sounded. In the early 2000s, two organizational management professors, Majken Schultz and Mary Jo Hatch, were studying the corporate branding of the LEGO Group when they came across what they called the “paradox of involving.”
Every organization in transition faced a tension between “cultural heritage and contemporary relevance.” New leaders usually want to make their mark, to push in a direction that felt distinct from the past. But was it possible to use the past and still move forward?
“No culture is completely new,” said Spencer Harrison, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD in France. “It is always layers of history building upon each other like layers of sediment.”
Macdonald’s first year was promising. The Seahawks finished 10-7, just missing a playoff spot. He embraced the team’s past, inviting former stars to connect with current ones. But in the weeks after last season, Schneider suggested that Macdonald might benefit from linking up with Gervais.
More than a decade earlier, Gervais had been one of the most unorthodox hires of the early Carroll era. A sport psychologist by training, he had a subspecialty in “consequential environments.” One of his last projects before focusing on the Seahawks was working with Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian extreme sports athlete who made headlines by jumping from a helium balloon more than 127,000 feet up in the earth’s stratosphere.
Gervais’ methods — meditation, sleep analysis, status profiles on the lives of players — became grist for curious reporters. Marshawn Lynch, the Seahawks’ star running back, called him a “shrink dude.” But his holistic approach became part of the team’s fabric under Carroll.
“I’ll never forget the first time I walked in the building,” said Stephen Hauschka, the Seahawks’ kicker from 2011 to 2016. “It was tangible how different it was.”
Meetings bubbled with enthusiasm. Players were loud and engaged. The staff was positive and optimistic. Carroll and Schneider tried to live out two principles:
“Always compete.”
“Do it better than anybody’s ever done it before.”
“That language was so unique,” Hauschka said. “I’d heard of people talking positively and things like that, but I hadn’t really seen it at an organizational level ever until I got there.”
The experience was so formative that Hauschka spent the rest of his career obsessed with understanding it. He went back to school and earned a masters in human performance. He started working with Gervais and consulting with the Buffalo Bills, where he played after leaving Seattle. He developed a working theory: “Culture is the most underutilized, under-leveraged competitive advantage in professional sports.”
When he returned to Seattle early last year, he ran into Schneider. The way Hauschka saw it, the new power structure was still settling in, and “the dust was still in the air of the rebuild and everybody was still adjusting to the first year.”
“It wasn’t the first year of Coach Mike,” Hauschka said. “It was the first without Pete.”
Not long after, he and Gervais returned to the Seahawks and went to work with Macdonald.
“Let’s help this guy build his vision,” Hauschka said.
Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold celebrates with Macdonald after the Super Bowl. (Photo by Kevin Sabitus / Getty Images)
Macdonald had two core principles at the heart of his program and a list of behaviors he wanted his players to embody. He wanted to create a culture of “chasing edges.” He wanted his players to embody a mentality: “12 is one: decisive, shocking and relentless.”
The “12,” in this case, was a reference to the team’s fans — the 12s — a tradition that dated back more than 40 years but exploded in the 2010s. It spoke to something larger, an idea that had inspired the way Schneider thought about culture, too. Schneider’s football education had begun as a child in Wisconsin, where he grew up in the shadow of Lambeau Field. He spent his childhood wanting to know what the Packers were doing to be better. He scored his first internship by writing a series of letters to Ron Wolf, then the team’s general manager.
Wolf was a top-down leader, clear-eyed and intimidating; Schneider gravitated more toward the philosophy of Collins, the management researcher who emphasized the combination of personal humility and professional will. Work like it’s up to you; pray like it’s up to God.
He loved to be challenged; he hated working with people who thought they had the answer. He wanted employees to know he had their back. But he asked for something in return. When they drove to work in the morning, he wanted them to think about how they were improving the organization. He found a kindred soul in Macdonald, who used a different phrase: Chasing edges.
“Every organization has a culture,” Gervais said. “The question is: Is that culture in service of high performance? Does that culture support and challenge people to be their very best?”
Gervais and Hauschka worked with Macdonald on refining two areas: clarity and connection. Macdonald was vulnerable with his players, admitting he wasn’t the best public speaker. They workshopped language so that Macdonald could be as clear as possible. They set up structures to allow the culture to flourish.
“Everybody wants to be the best version of themselves every day,” said defensive tackle Jarran Reed.
Macdonald wanted to lead with “honesty in the approach,” to let players know there was a vision for each. He wanted to “stack wins.” He wanted his players to be “loose and focused,” so he started encouraging competitions in games like ping pong and shadowboxing, a TikTok trend turned locker room phenomenon.
Macdonald also set up a tradition of “walks and talks,” an exercise on the calendar every third Thursday, where players from different position groups came together and discussed a question of the day. In the days before the Super Bowl, the Seahawks did it one more time.
The question: 10 years from now, when we have a team reunion, what will you remember?
The answer came late on Sunday night. The Seahawks had just finished off a dominating performance, suffocating the Patriots in a game that eerily resembled the franchise’s first championship. Twelve years ago, Carroll’s Seahawks crushed the Denver Broncos in a blowout win punctuated by a similarly dominant defensive performance. On Sunday, Cliff Avril, a defensive end on that team, sat inside Levi’s Stadium and couldn’t help but see the parallels.
“Very similar in a sense of mentality and brotherhood,” he said.
When it was over, Macdonald stood on a temporary stage, his clothing soaked in Gatorade, and asked his players to collect the Lombardi Trophy.
“We love our players,” he said. “Look, they made it happen. They made it come to life.”
Macdonald was talking about the victory, but he just as easily could have been talking about the culture.