Pete Carroll gives Seahawks reassuring message on ownership situation after Paul Allen’s death

Pete Carroll has assured his players nothing is changing for the Seahawks, their ownership-to-football structure or their operation in the wake of owner Paul Allen’s death last week.

The coach said Monday the man he talks to about ownership issues and interests remains the one it was, along with Allen, before Allen died Oct. 15 after complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That man is Bert Kolde.

Kolde is Allen’s vice chairman of the Seahawks, and of the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers Allen also owned.

“There really isn’t much conversation about that, other than to know we’ve really dealt with Bert Kolde the whole time, throughout. Bert has assured us that everything is in order and everything will continue to carry on as it has,” Carroll said following Monday’s practice.

Speculation in the wake of Allen’s death at age 65 has been on whether the Seahawks will be for sale or whether the team will be owned by Allen’s sister, Jody Allen. She is the vice-chair for First & Goal, Inc., the company Allen founded to run the Seahawks when he bought the team from Ken Behring in 1997. She is also the president of Vulcan Productions, part of her brother’s wide-ranging Vulcan company.

Again, as the world recognized again last week, the Seahawks are only one part of the various companies and philanthropies associated with the Microsoft co-founder and man estimated last year by Forbes to be worth an estimated $20 billion. There are myriad estate and legacy interests and issues to sort through in these weeks and months following his death, far beyond just Allen’s NFL team.

The NFL requires all team owners to have a continually updated succession plan on file with the league. The NFL has in the last week had no comment on what that succession plan is beyond Allen for the Seahawks.

Carroll said all he knows is nothing has changed for him or the team.

“We have really good structure and really clear communications. And, really, we’ve only communicated with Bert and Paul. So there’s not like a big chain of command that we have to figure out,” Carroll said.

“But I know that there is so much to be done through the (Allen) empire. The factions of it that are running smoothly and are clear-cut and all of that are going to continue that way. We expect it to. So we are just going to carry on.

“That’s it. There really is nothing else to report. I wouldn’t even know where to go to find anything else out at this time.”

Allen died hours after the team returned from its win over Oakland in London last week. Then the players returned Monday from their bye week.

In that span Carroll met with Seahawks players to assure them Allen’s death is not changing how the team operates from within.

“You know, I made an effort to ensure the players of the same thought: We are fine. Everything is going to be doing it like we’ve been doing it,” Carroll said. “We’ll carry on with the same expectations and intensity and support, and all of that.

“And that it was our job, really, to carry on in the fashion that Paul wanted us to, how he designed this to happen. We have that responsibility. Everybody is excited about doing that.”

Kolde appeared at a press conference for one of the only times of Carroll’s eight-year tenure with the Seahawks last month. That was for the team announcing a new president, Chuck Arnold, a Tacoma native and graduate of Curtis High School.

I took the rare opportunity to ask Kolde there on Sept. 24 what the Seahawks’ long-term plan is beyond Carroll’s and general manager John Schneider’s contracts ending following the 2019 season.

“Don’t have anything to talk about the bigger picture going forward,” Kolde said. “Not now. We are just moving forward, and people are in place with multiyear contracts.

“We are moving forward.”

That was one week before Allen announced Oct. 1 he was battling cancer for a third time.

This story was originally published October 22, 2018 at 5:08 PM.