Pete Carroll Seahawks extension through 2025 has him on track to be oldest NFL coach ever
Pete Carroll’s energetic run to becoming the oldest coach in NFL history rolls on.
A league source confirmed to The News Tribune shortly before the Seahawks’ game Sunday at the Buffalo Bills that the team has reached an agreement on a contract extension with the 69-year-old Carroll to remain with Seattle through the 2025 season.
Carroll confirmed the contract extension following the poorest Seahawks performance this season, with widespread malfunctioning in a 44-34 loss.
The deal will make Carroll one of the league’s highest-paid coaches, if not highest-paid, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported.
“This has been done for a while, since early this season,” the league source told The News Tribune.
The Seahawks and Carroll would have preferred the deal remain hushed while the nation goes through the coronavirus pandemic and a tumultuous presidential election.
“For a gesture like this from Jody Allen and the organization, and all, at a time when everybody is struggling and suffering and all that—I mean, it is something that has been in the works for a long time,” Carroll said. “We’ve been talking, way before all the issues that have happened (in our country). So it finally came together.
“Just didn’t feel like it needed to be talked about, unless we had to.”
The oldest full-time coaches in NFL history are George Halas and Marv Levy. Both coached until they were 72.
Carroll will be 74 at the end of his new deal.
Asked if he indeed intends to fulfill all of the new contract and coach past his 74th birthday, Carroll smiled.
“Whatever keeps rolling. Whatever those years are,” he said.
“Whatever they are, I’m rollin’.
“Five-year plan.”
He told The News Tribune in 2014, when he was 62 and in the middle of Seattle’s consecutive Super Bowl seasons, that he wanted to coach 10 more years. Recently he has said he thinks more in shorter increments for his career, a couple years at a time.
Carroll began coaching when Richard Nixon was president. That was in 1973, at University of Pacific where he played defensive back.
The Seahawks were criticized in 2010 when they hired Carroll after his failed NFL head-coaching stints with the New England Patriots and New York Jets in 1990s. The critics said Carroll’s rah-rah, love-for-players’, collegiate approach that he used to build a dynasty at USC would not work in the NFL.
Um...
Carroll has led the most successful decade in Seahawks history: seven playoff appearances in the last eight years, consecutive appearances in the Super Bowl and the franchise’s only NFL championship, for the 2013 season.
Seattle entered Sunday’s game 6-1, the best record in the NFC.
This year he has led the Seahawks’ strong lean into the Black Lives Matter movement. He canceled practice late in training camp, in August, to ensure all players got registered to vote.
He’s been open in discussing how he wishes the nation as a whole had the self-discipline to wear masks and avoid public gatherings to curb the spread of the coronavirus that continues to affect the U.S. at record rates.
In other words, he’s not slowing down. He never does.
This contract extension recognizes that.
Romeo Crennel, 73, is currently coaching the Houston Texans on an interim basis for the rest of this season.
This story was originally published November 8, 2020 at 9:30 AM.
