Pete Carroll is an oil salesman, it’s up to you whether you believe he’s selling snake oil or the best crude out there. Carroll is the head coach and de facto General Manager of the Seattle Seahawks and he’ll be trying to win his second Super Bowl in a row this Sunday. At 63, Carroll is at the top of his profession. His ideas, philosophy, and energetic personality seem to pervade the Seahawks organization. If you’re a Seahawks fan, you probably love Pete Carroll. If you’re a Patriots fan, you probably don’t. If you are in the majority that isn’t a fan of either team, then learning more about Carroll may help you decide who to root for on Sunday. It will certainly help you understand and enjoy the game in greater depth.
What is Pete Carroll’s background?
Carroll is a California guy, through and through. He was born and raised in San Francisco. As a kid, he was a star athlete, but his performance trailed off in high school when his growth couldn’t keep up to his capacity for competitive sports. In college, Carroll played football, first for College of Marin and then University of the Pacific. He played well, mostly as a defensive back, in the relative obscurity of the Pacific Coast Athletic Conference. After graduation, he tried to make it as a professional football player, but could not, not even in the now-defunct World Football League. In 1973, at the age of 22, Carroll took his first job as a coach and (basically) has never done anything else.
Carroll worked in various assistant coach capacities, again mostly on the defensive side of the team, for 20 years, first in college and then in the NFL before getting his first chance as a head coach. In 1994, Carroll was hired as head coach of the New York Jets. He didn’t last long. After starting the year 6-5, his team lost their remaining five games to finish 6-10. Carroll was fired. He returned to California and to defense to lick his wounds. He become defensive coordinator of the San Francisco 49ers and after two years of that, got another shot at being head coach of an NFL team. The New England Patriots hired him. This time Carroll lasted three years, after which, despite a 33-31 record and having made the playoffs twice, he was fired again. Again he returned to California to heal, becoming head coach of the University of Southern California (USC) football team at the end of 2000.
At USC, Carroll finally found the success he had been hunting during his decades of apprenticeship and false starts as a head coach. After going 6-6 in his first year as head coach, USC went on an almost unprecedented run of success. In the next eight seasons, USC won 77 games, lost only 13, won seven of eight bowl games, and two national championships. Carroll became one of the most feared head coaches in college football.
In 2010, after nine years as head coach of USC, Carroll decided to return to the NFL to become the head coach and de facto general manager of the Seattle Seahawks. It was a risky and somewhat controversial move. It was risky because after two previous failures as a head coach in the NFL, Carroll risked his legacy as a great coach if he were to fail again. It was controversial because people said he was fleeing the college game with the NCAA on his tails. Indeed, after he left, the NCAA imposed severe sanctions on USC for basically paying some of their football players. Carroll refuted these accusations fervently but he did so from the safety of Seattle and a job in an openly professional football league.
Carroll’s time in Seattle has mirrored his time at USC so far. Again it took him a little to turn the team around but once he got it headed in the right direction, it’s been very successful. In his first two years at Seattle, the team went 7-9. After that, 11-5, 13-3, 12-5, with two Super Bowl appearances and one victory. Carroll has again scaled the mountain. How does he do it? What is he all about?
What’s he all about?
Pete Carroll is relentlessly laid back. He is an aggressive play-caller (which got him the moniker as “Big Ball’s Pete” at USC) who relies heavily on his players’ instincts and talent to win games. My lasting image of Pete Carroll will always be a .gif someone created which was featured on Deadspin.com and shows Carroll swaggering on the sideline with a top-hat, monocle, and cane drawn in, completing his characterization as a 19th century robber baron.
If there is a single theme that runs throughout everything Carroll believes in and does as a football coach, it is positive energy. In a wonderful 2009 profile of Carroll written by Mike Sager and published in Esquire, Carroll’s son Brennon, who was working as an assistant coach under his father at the time, said that both he and his Dad have attention deficit disorder. Brennon said, “It probably helps more than it hurts, being a little off the wall.” and that certainly seems to be true. As a new coach in Seattle, Carroll implemented a set of arrangements unusual for the NFL (although some have become standard since then). According to this ESPN article by Alyssa Roenigk, the Seahawks offered optional meditation, required yoga, experimental brain testing programs, and created an entire branch of their staff to “look after the players.” Carroll said of returning to the NFL that he “wanted to find out if we went to the NFL and really took care of guys, really cared about each and every individual, what would happen?” His mantra is “Do your job better than it has ever been done before” which, this year at least, provides a stark contrast with Seattle’s Super Bowl opponents, the New England Patriots, whose rallying cry has been “Do your job.”
Carroll’s demeanor on the sidelines is a rare one for the NFL. He looks happy! He loves his job and he isn’t afraid to show it. Here’s a description of Carroll arriving at work from the Esquire magazine article:
Carroll entered from his office across the hall, McMuffin in hand. His mouth was full, he was chewing, he was wearing the silly/happy expression of a guy who’s just come to work after his morning surf. “What’s happenin’ boys?”
Most head coaches in football act like their job is the hardest and most serious thing in the world. Carroll acts like he’s the luckiest guy in the world. He’s relentlessly positive and so far, with few exceptions, he has been proven correct. There certainly seems to be something infectious about his attitude. During Seattle’s last game, the NFC Championship game against Green Bay, they were down by 12 points with less than three minutes to go. Seattle’s quarterback, Russell Wilson, had had by far his worst game ever, and the game seemed like a lost cause to everyone but the Seahawks themselves. The relentlessly optimistic character of their head coach, which had become a philosophy for their team, instructed them to keep playing and keep believing that they would win. They did.
What will it mean if he wins? What will it mean if he loses?
If the Seahawks win the Super Bowl, it will vault Pete Carroll into the ranks of true coaching royalty. Already one of just three men who have coached a college team to a national championship and a professional team to the Super Bowl, Carroll will be included in any conversation about the best coaches ever. Repeat champions are rare in the NFL — only seven coaches have ever been able to win two Super Bowls in a row — and that fact will add to Carroll’s legend.
If the Seahawks lose, it won’t diminish Carroll’s legacy to far, but it would change the way he is seen. Without the bright lights of a repeat championship, we may see more articles written about how the Seahawks lead the league in performance enhancing drug suspension or about how Carroll’s task was made so much easier by the part-skillful but also part-lucky choice of Russell Wilson in the draft. Wilson is a wonderful quarterback and he is still paid so little on his rookie contract that it gives the Seahawks an advantage by freeing up money to spend elsewhere. If the Seahawks lose, people are going to be more likely to remember Carroll’s flight from the NCAA sanctions looming over USC. The Seahawks’ comeback victory over the Green Bay Packers will be remembered as an incredible fluke not the righteous confirmation of Carroll’s positive thinking.
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