ATLANTA – The Seahawks arrived in Atlanta having lost three straight games, and they took the field Sunday without two of their top three cornerbacks, a starting safety and with a rookie making his first career start at right tackle, not an ideal situation going into a road game against a Falcons team that had won three in a row.

They ended their afternoon with “Sea-Hawks!” Chants echoed through an otherwise nearly empty Mercedes-Benz Stadium as the clock ticked down on a 34-14 Seahawks victory.

If the Seahawks aren’t able to overcome their recent struggles and lingering injuries, then someone forgot to tell them, because the Seahawks responded to the first real adversity of 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 move on. We have to keep stacking up these days, keep stacking our preparation, take what we have to learn from this game and keep pushing forward. It’s still early in the season, but it’s definitely great to get back in the win column.”

For the Seahawks, Sunday’s win was built on what the players and Macdonald felt was a strong week of preparation. It began with a meeting Monday to get to the bottom of the team’s problems while highlighting many of the good things that had taken place en route to a 3-3 record.

“Just proud of our guys,” Macdonald said. “After the game we said that the message was: team victory. I felt we deserved the win in our preparation from Monday to Saturday. We had the energy, the focus, the togetherness and everything we needed to win and we did.”

Safety Julian Love said: “We had a great week of training. This is not lip service. It’s about paying attention to details. We had an extra day, so we have Monday, then Wednesday, then Thursday, and so on. “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 – the offense takes care of the ball, the defense gets the ball, we are strong and flexible. Sometimes they don’t break on defense, on offense they have explosive plays at all times, it all came together.

“It started with Mike and started with our leaders just embracing it: ‘Hey, we’re here. We know what we do well, we know what we don’t do well, let’s try to address the problem. But understand that we “Do everything well.” I know it felt like the end of the world for some people to lose a few games in a row, but we do a lot of good things so it was just about the bad ones To correct things and improve things and then keep doing it. We can be an attacking team, so I really appreciate how he approached it. He said exactly what it was, and when you see it in black and white, you can attack it.