Mike Macdonald enters his third season as the NFL’s third-best head coach, according to the Associated Press. A panel of eight AP pro football writers ranked the top five coaches heading into 2026, and the Seattle Seahawks‘ coach landed at No. 3 behind Kansas City’s Andy Reid and the Rams’ Sean McVay, appearing on seven of the eight ballots with three third-place votes.
The resume behind the vote is short and heavy. Macdonald led Seattle to a Super Bowl title in just his second season, beating New England 29-13 for the franchise’s second championship, and at 38 he became the third-youngest head coach to win a Lombardi — only McVay and Mike Tomlin, both 36 when they won, got there earlier. He went 10-7 in year one, then coached the team to the NFL’s mountaintop in year two.
The engine of that rise is the unit Macdonald built himself. Seattle’s defense allowed an NFL-low 292 points last season — 17.2 per game — the direct descendant of the scheme he ran as Baltimore’s coordinator before taking the Seattle job. Coach rankings usually reward offensive playcallers; Macdonald cracked the top three on the strength of a defense that closed out a championship. For a franchise that built its last title on the Legion of Boom, the symmetry is hard to miss.
Reid took the top spot for the fourth straight year despite a 6-11 season in Kansas City, drawing five first-place votes; McVay took the other three. San Francisco’s Kyle Shanahan placed fourth and Denver’s Sean Payton fifth — which means the NFC West owns three of the top four spots on the list, and Macdonald will face two of the other men on it four times a year. Seattle beat McVay’s Rams in the NFC Championship Game and eliminated Shanahan’s 49ers in the divisional round on the way to the title.
The defending champions report to training camp July 25 and open the season September 9 against New England — a Super Bowl rematch, and the first chance to see whether the league’s No. 3 coach can make the climb to No. 1 the only way voters respect: by doing it twice.
