Seahawks' Mike Macdonald Reacts To Penalty Problem: 'Live That Life'

Most teams want to play a clean football game, but on Sunday, in the Seattle Seahawks' 30-23 win over the Los Angeles Chargers at Lumen Field, neither team did.

In fact, it was the furthest thing from a clean game.

The teams had a combined five turnovers, two of which happened on the first offensive play for each, and then the big one.

A whopping 30 combined penalties, with the Seahawks having 14 and the Chargers 16, as the referees were kept extremely busy with the laundry flying often.

It was easily the worst penalty performance of the year, and Seattle's 14 was more than what the team had in the previous two weeks combined (11).

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So you could look at it as an outlier, with the Seahawks only having 10 penalties or more once this season (Week 1), or as Mike Macdonald says, given how his team wants to play on defense, sometimes that's just part and parcel of playing that way.

"Probably overestimated the importance of the context behind the penalty and terms of the down and the distance, it's just we want to play great football all the time. no matter the circumstance," Madconald said. "Chasing edges means something around here. We want to play a certain way. We want to bring it up to the lin,e and then we don't want to cross the line.

"There's a couple plays where we went over the line. We're going to learn from it. But in order to play our style of defense and play physically and have waves of the football and be able to take aggressive angles to the ball and taking shots on the ball, you got to live that life. And so sometimes you go over the line a little bit, and we'll learn from it and keep rolling."

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So sometimes, it is just the nature of the beast for Seattle.

Its defense prides itself on being a tough, physical unit, and that means playing right on the line, and when you do that often enough, sometimes you occasionally go over it.

Is that what happened on Sunday?

You can make that case as this season, the Seahawks haven't been a big penalty team, yet 14 were totaled against the Chargers.

So, a lot has to be cleaned up this week as the San Francisco 49ers are on the schedule, and if the Seahawks have another 14 penalties, Kyle Shanahan's team is good enough to make them pay dearly.