Aldon Smith latest Pete Carroll Seahawks reform project. Most have failed. 3 have soared.
Before one of his first drafts as an NFL general manager, John Schneider drew a line for his Seahawks against domestic violence.
“We would never take a player that struck a female or had a domestic-violence dispute like that,” Schneider said in 2012.
Three years later, he and Pete Carroll did.
They drafted Frank Clark.
Clark had made it out of “The Jungle,” aka Baldwin Village, a notoriously tough area of Los Angeles. He moved from there as a kid to Cleveland, to live with relatives and go to high school. He earned a football scholarship to the University of Michigan.
In November of 2014 Michigan kicked him out of its program, following his arrest and brief jailing for domestic violence in Ohio.
A police report stated that that he reportedly struck his girlfriend during an incident at a hotel outside Sandusky, Ohio. Witnesses told police the 20-year-old woman appeared to be unconscious. After an investigation, a local prosecutor determined Clark did not strike her.
The prosecutor agreed to a plea bargain with Clark and reduced the charge to disorderly conduct, a fourth-degree misdemeanor. Clark paid $350 in fines and court costs, plus an undisclosed probation fee.
Then the Seahawks made Clark their top pick in the 2015 draft.
“Believe in me,” Clark said the night Seattle picked him.
Carroll believes in them. Many of them.
Seattle’s 69-year-old coach believes in guys with “red flags” and “character issues” that are a part of the endless talk leading up to every draft, or during every free-agency period each offseason.
It’s why the Seahawks signed Aldon Smith this month.
After giving him his return to the NFL last year, the Dallas Cowboys gave up on the 31-year-old former All-Pro pass rusher this offseason. Smith was suspended out of the league for the 2016 through ‘19 seasons., following substance-abuse violations, a no-contest plea for domestic violence and false imprisonment, and an arrest on charges of driving under the influence and vandalism.
Carroll signed Smith to Seattle this month.
Two days into being a Seahawk, Smith allegedly choked a man into unconsciousness at a coffee shop in the New Orleans suburbs. Smith turned himself in to a county jail in Louisiana this week. He was charged with second-degree battery. He is free on $25,000 bond, pending further investigation and court proceedings.
Carroll’s mindset
Carroll has immersed himself in the teachings of grit, specifically from Dr. Angela Duckworth. In 2000, the only year since 1973 that he didn’t coach football, he internalized the principles of legendary UCLA basketball icon John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success.” That year of hiatus came after the New York Jets and the New England Patriots fired Carroll from his first two NFL head-coaching jobs.
“Pete, he’s the ultimate players’ coach,” Brandon Browner once said.
Carroll unearthed Browner from the Canadian Football League to become a charter member of the Seahawks’ famed “Legion of Boom” secondary in 2011.
“I’ve never met any coach like him as far as the way he approaches the game,” Browner said.
Browner said that in 2015. It was after he got suspended from the Seahawks’ Super Bowl 48 win over Denver the year before, for violating the league’s substance-abuse policy.
It was before he was sent to prison.
Carroll believes perhaps more than any coach in the NFL, that by force of personality and team culture he extract the unique skills of each player, even if a checkered past caused other teams to give up on a guy’s talent because it wasn’t worth the work.
Or the risk.
“I mean, I’ve said it a million times to you guys: We are always looking for guys that have something special about them,” Carroll said in 2020.
That was when he and the Seahawks signed back Josh Gordon, after the former All-Pro wide receiver’s eighth NFL suspension for drugs.
“He’s a unique talent.”
That’s ultimately the reason Carroll takes these risks: supreme athletic talent. Ultimately, he’s paid to win games, not judge “red flags.” Having the most best players wins the most games.
Smith is only the latest example.
Carroll acknowledged trying to sign ex-All-Pro receiver Antonio Brown in 2019, but the New England Patriots beat him to it immediately after the Raiders cut him. Carroll let it be known Seattle was interested again last year when Brown became a free agent while suspended again last season. Brown decided to join Tom Brady for a Super Bowl run and win with Tampa Bay this past winter.
Carroll isn’t the only NFL coach who takes on risky players. Bill Belichick has done it for years with the Patriots. He signed Browner after the cornerback’s two league suspensions for drugs. Browner played in Super Bowl 49 for the Patriots against the Seahawks in 2015. Belichick signed Gordon and had him for about a year before waiving him and Carroll claiming him for Seattle in 2019. And Belichick signed Brown before Carroll could.
Belichick and Carroll, the two oldest coaches and among the most successful in the league, are also among those who take on the most risk.
That doesn’t mean all those risky signings and draft picks have succeeded.
In fact, for Carroll in Seattle, only four certifiably have. Seven have ultimately failed.
Like in baseball, batting .364 (4 for 11) is a big success. Especially when the three have hit as hugely as Carroll’s three best have with the Seahawks.
That includes a Carroll dice roll that created a unique, relentless, likely Hall-of-Fame running back who said he was just here so he didn’t get fined.
Here are Carroll’s riskiest moves, in order of how successful they became, and the busts in order of how badly they turned out for Seattle.
Handsome payoffs
1. Marshawn Lynch
The prologue: After rushing for 1,115 yards and seven touchdowns for Buffalo as a rookie 12th-overall pick in 2007, Lynch pleaded guilty in the summer of 2008 to a traffic violation. He admitted to driving off after striking a female pedestrian with his 2008 Porsche Cayenne near Buffalo’s downtown bar district.
In March 2009, Lynch faced up to a year in jail in California. Police in the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City found a 9mm semiautomatic handgun in a backpack in the trunk of a parked car without license plates in which Lynch was sitting. Lynch pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of having a concealed firearm in a vehicle. He was sentenced to 80 hours of community service and three years of probation.
The NFL suspended him for Buffalo’s first three games of 2009 for violating the league’s personal-conduct policy.
What Carroll did: By the middle of the 2010 season, Carroll saw Lynch as the epitome of what he wanted his Seahawks to become on offense: physical, unrelenting, unapologetic.
Carroll also knew Lynch was seeking a fresh start after his troubles in Buffalo. So he traded a fourth-round draft choice in 2011 and a conditional 2012 pick to the Bills. Carroll cut Julius Jones, Seattle’s leading rusher in 2008 and ‘09. He made Lynch the new foundation for his Seahawks offense.
The result: The best trade in Seahawks history.
Lynch loved Carroll, and he absolutely thrived in Seattle while being himself. He became “Beast Mode,” the soul of the Seahawks’ back-to-back Super Bowl teams and only Seattle squad to win the NFL championship, at the end of the 2013 season. His “Beast Quake” touchdown run in the team’s playoff win over New Orleans in January 2011, three months after the trade, remains one of the most iconic plays in NFL history.
Had Carroll given the ball to Lynch from the 1-yard line in the final seconds of Super Bowl 49 against New England instead of having Russell Wilson throw his infamous interception that lost the title, Lynch and the Seahawks might have won consecutive Super Bowl rings.
Lynch had at least 1,200 yards rushing and 11 touchdowns in each of his first four full seasons with Seattle. He led the league in rushing touchdowns in two of those years, 2013 and ‘14. Four of Lynch’s five Pro Bowl selections in his career came with Seattle. He was a 2012 All-Pro with the Seahawks.
And his popularity soared inside the team’s locker room—and worldwide—following his “I’m just here so I won’t get fined” perfomance in Phoenix in the days leading up to Super Bowl 49.
After famously retiring online in a way only he would during Super Bowl 50 in February 2016, Lynch returned to play in 2017 and ‘18 for his hometown Raiders. He re-signed with Seattle on Christmas Eve 2019—”Merry New Year!” he said that day—and played in the regular-season finale plus the Seahawks’ two playoff games into January 2020. Then he retired again.
Lynch went from needing a new start out of Buffalo to being a likely Hall of Famer with Seattle.
2. Frank Clark
The prologue: For months after he got kicked out of Michigan Clark worked out alone at a local gym. He had no trainers or the specialty draft-preparation academies top prospects use. Many NFL teams did not have Clark on their draft boards, deeming him untouchable.
What Carroll did: Three years after the no-domestic-violence proclamation Schneider probably wished he hadn’t made, Carroll and the Seahawks drafted Clark with their first pick of the 2015 draft. It was at 63rd overall in the second round, six spots ahead of where they drafted wide receiver Tyler Lockett.
Clark may have been the riskiest, leap-of-faith top pick in franchise history. The police report and photos introduced as evidence in his case in Ohio weren’t the best look in an NFL that has, like our society, had too many domestic violence issues the last decade.
Carroll and Schneider said they spent months conducting countless interviews investigating Clark’s situation. But the Seahawks acknowledged later they did not talk to the alleged victim or anyone who said they saw the incident between Clark and the woman in the Ohio hotel. The Seahawks were convinced he did not hit a woman. Carroll and Schneider said they wouldn’t have made the stunning pick if they believed he had.
“I mean, they questioned me about the incident. They went through every single detail,” Clark, then 21, said the night Seattle drafted him. “I simply kept it real with them. I don’t pride myself on lying.”
What league sources told The News Tribune then was that Clark repeatedly told Seahawks owner Paul Allen, Schneider, Carroll and top scouts that he did not touch the woman who accused him. That he was telling the complete truth. That he was sorry for and guilty of putting himself in the wrong situation. Police came. So did the charges and a plea bargain, then the requisite counseling.
“There’s more to one side to a police report,” Schneider said then.
Asked after he drafted Clark if his 2012 statement the Seahawks would never draft a player who had a past that included domestic violence, Schneider said that draft night, “Yep,” it still did.
The result: Clark had some immature moments, such as in 2017 when he lashed out inappropriately online on his Twitter account at a female reporter who had written a story two years earlier about domestic violence in the NFL.
But he matured, and excelled, in Seattle, including as a father of a young daughter born in Bellevue early in his NFL career. In 2019 he was coming off a career year with 14 sacks in 17 games including the playoffs. The Seahawks gave him a franchise tag worth over $17 million, to keep their top pass rusher from leaving in free agency that year. Then they traded him to Kansas City in April 2019 and gained a first-round pick, a second-round pick and $17 million in salary-cap space for that year.
The first-round pick became defensive end L.J. Collier. The Seahawks traded their K.C. choice they got for Clark at the bottom of the second round last year to Carolina; the Panthers selected safety Jeremy Chinn with it. In the 2020 third round, Seattle then drafted guard Damien Lewis, a full-time starter from week one as a rookie last year. In the fifth round, they chose defensive end Alton Robinson, rounding out the picks the Panthers gave them for that second-round choice the Chiefs had sent the Seahawks for Clark.
The Chiefs rewarded Clark with the money he’d wanted from the Seahawks: $105.5 million over five years. He won a Super Bowl with Kansas City at the end of the 2019 season. He played in a second Super Bowl with the Chiefs in February.
3. Bruce Irvin
The prologue: Many saw Irvin as a one-dimensional player coming out of West Virginia for the 2012 draft: able to rush the passer off the edge and that’s it. Experts saw him as a second-day draftee, in the third round or later.
Irvin was jailed in Georgia as a teen. He’d been a dropout without a high-school degree who’d broken into a drug dealer’s house with others to steal money. He was arrested and jailed but set free when the drug dealer didn’t come forward to testify against him — for obvious reasons.
“I mean, it’s a blessing. I thank God every day. I thank God when I go out here to practice,” Irvin said in 2015.
“Because Lord knows I was supposed to be in jail or dead somewhere.”
He took and passed his GED test. That and acquaintances got him into junior colleges in Kansas and California. He was a junior-college national champion, then had 22 1/2 sacks in 16 career games for West Virginia.
What Carroll did: The coach and Seahawks again defied NFL convention. They saw an elite athlete and drafted Irvin 15th overall in 2012. It was two rounds ahead of where most thought he’d get drafted.
Heck, it was two rounds before the Seahawks drafted Russell Wilson and one round before they picked Bobby Wagner that year.
The result: Irvin did more than pressure quarterbacks in the NFL. With Carroll and linebackers coach Ken Norton Jr. teaching him and Wagner mentoring next to him, Irvin became an every-down, run-and-pass-stopping linebacker, and a Super Bowl champion who has earned $46.6 million in his nine-year career.
After Irvin spent four seasons away playing for the Raiders, his hometown Falcons and the Panthers, Carroll brought him back to Seattle for the 2020 season. Irvin called it the “perfect situation.”
But he tore knee ligaments just two games into his Seattle return. He had season-ending surgery last fall. His $5 million contract expired with the end of last season. He had a second surgery this winter. He is unsigned for 2021 at age 33.
“Really, he’s made his mistakes along the way,” Carroll said. “But probably more obviously than any of the other guys we have, he has grown through what he’s faced.”
4. Tony McDaniel
The prologue: In January 2005, McDaniel assaulted a fellow University of Tennessee student during a pick-up basketball game. McDaniel broke bones in the man’s face. He was initially charged with felony aggravated assault. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault.
After that year he left Tennessee and entered the NFL draft early. He went undrafted and signed as a free agent with Jacksonville. He played his first three pro seasons with the Jaguars and next four with the Miami Dolphins.
On February 6, 2010, McDaniel was arrested in south Florida on a charge of domestic battery against his girlfriend. The charges were later reduced to disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. He pleaded no contest. He was sentenced to six months probation and ordered to attend counseling. The NFL suspended McDaniel one game for violating its personal-conduct policy.
What Carroll did: He saw a huge tackle with athleticism to join Seattle’s deep defensive line. Seattle signed him to a one-year contract before the 2013 season.
The result: McDaniel became a key to a deep rotation of D-linemen that wore down and dominated offensive lines all that season. He got a second contract after the team’s Super Bowl win in February 2014. He played the 2014 season for Seattle, then got cut to save cap space in 2015, when the Seahawks were making Wilson and Wagner the highest-paid players in the league at their positions.
After one season away in Tampa Bay, McDaniel re-signed with Seattle in 2016. He played one season with 10 starts in his second Seahawks stint. He retired after playing for New Orleans and San Francisco in 2017.
The backfires
1. Malik McDowell
The prologue: McDowell entered 2016 considered by some to be a top-10 pick in the 2017 draft. He was a long, athletic defensive tackle at Michigan State. He also could be disruptive outside at end. But bad body language on the field and bad play in his final college season as Michigan State had a losing 2016 were red flags for many NFL teams.
Not for Seattle.
What Carroll did: The coach bet on what he usually bets on: physical talent, and his ability to connect with young men. Carroll and the Seahawks made McDowell their first pick in 2017, at number 35 overall.
The result: McDowell impressed in his first rookie minicamp, in May 2017.
That was the last time he did anything in the NFL.
He had a mysterious, infamous accident while on an all-terrain vehicle in his home state of Michigan that summer. He sustained serious head injuries. He never played a down in the pros.
The Seahawks released him in March 2019. They sued him to get back some of his contract money for services never rendered. McDowell never played in an NFL game, not even a preseason one, amid continued troubles.
He remains the worst top pick in Seahawks history, one of the worst in league history. Zero games played and derailing years of future expectations on a defensive line is quite a low bar.
2. Percy Harvin
The prologue: Harvin was a game-breaking wide receiver and kick returner for four years with Minnesota. He earned a Pro Bowl selection in his rookie season after six touchdowns receiving and two kickoff returns for scores in 2009. But by the end of 2012, he and the Vikings were at odds over extending his rookie contract.
What Carroll did: The veteran coach has always loved supersonic speed in outside wide receivers, to stretch defenses’ abilities to cover big-play passes deep down the field. Before the 2013 season, Carroll and Schneider sent the Vikings a first-round and a seventh-round pick in the 2013 draft plus a third-round choice in 2014 to acquire Harvin.
Then, the Seahawks signed Harvin to a six-year, $67 million contract.
The result: Harvin had injury issues, anxiety issues and anger issues while in Seattle. His finest moment for the Seahawks was returning a kickoff for a touchdown in Super Bowl 48, one of many highlights in Seattle’s obliteration of Peyton Manning and Denver for the NFL title at the end of the 2013 season, Harvin’s first with the Seahawks.
But Harvin marred even that shining moment. In the New York City area before that championship game, he punched teammate Golden Tate. The fellow Seahawks receiver ended up in a trash can. Harvin later told Bleacher Report Lynch was the peacemaker in that incident. Harvin also told Bleacher Report he played every game of his NFL career high on substances, his way of dealing with his anxiety problems.
In October 2014, Seattle traded its highest-paid player in the middle of the season to the 1-6 New York Jets for future draft-choice considerations. The Seahawks made the deal as they were boarding buses to the airport for a flight to a road game at the St. Louis Rams.
The Seahawks paid Harvin $18.3 million and gave away three draft choices in exchange for eight games and many more headaches from him.
3. Dion Jordan
The prologue: The third-overall choice by Miami in the 2013 draft had three sacks over 26 games his first two NFL seasons. In 2014, he had one sack and missed six Dolphins games because of suspensions for positive drug tests. One was for MDMA (also known as ecstasy), the other for marijuana. Enrolled in the league’s substance-abuse program, he gave a diluted sample at a test late in that 2014 season. The NFL’s policy and program for substances of abuse treat diluted samples like positive ones.
That third positive test resulted in the league suspending him for the entire 2015 season. It also voided his $20.5 million contract with Miami.
He missed all of 2016, too, because of multiple knee surgeries.
What Carroll did: He stayed true to another of his coaching tenets: you can never have enough pass rushers—or former first-round draft choices. Though he hadn’t played since Dec. 2014, Jordan got a contract from the Seahawks for the 2017 season.
The result: He missed the first half of the ‘17 season after Seahawks doctors sent him for another knee surgery to repair what didn’t get fixed previously. His sack Nov. 8, 2017, at Arizona was his first in nearly three years. Jordan finished that season with four sacks. That earned him another contract with Seattle, for 2018.
He had 1 1/2 sacks in 12 games that year. He didn’t play another game for the Seahawks after 2018. In May 2019 the NFL suspended him for 10 games after he lost his appeal for another failed drug test. Jordan told NFL.com that he tested positive for Adderall. The NFL had approved Jordan using the drug for attention deficit disorder, but the therapeutic use exemption the league had given him had expired.
Jordan had three sacks in 13 games last season, his first one playing for the 49ers. He’s a 31-year-old free agent.
4. Brandon Marshall
The huge (6-4, 229-pound) wide receiver was an All-Pro in 2012 for catching 118 passes for 1,508 yards for Chicago. He had 109 receptions with a league-leading 14 touchdowns in 2015 with the New York Jets, then 59 for them in 2016. He played only a month of the 2017 season before getting injured with the Giants.
In 2016, ESPN reported Marshall and Sheldon Richardson, then two of the Jets’ biggest stars, had a loud “verbal altercation” in New York’s locker room following a game.
In 2014 while playing for the Bears, he defended himself against allegations surrounding his arrests on suspicion of domestic abuse and misdemeanor battery back in 2007 and ‘08.
In 2009, his Denver Broncos suspended him during the preseason for insubordination. That was weeks after he was acquitted of a misdemeanor battery charge in Atlanta. Prosecutors there had accused him of beating his then-girlfriend.
Marshall was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in 2011. That illness is known for causing impulsive behavior, wild mood swings and problems in relationships. He co-founded PROJECT 375, a nonprofit that is dedicated to the education, support and treatment of mental health.
What Carroll did: He signed Marshall in the spring of 2018, right after the Giants cut him rather than pay him $5 million. Seattle was his sixth team in 12 NFL seasons.
“We would always like to have (big wide receivers),” Carroll said in May 2018. “Our guys that do a lot of our playing are the quicker guys, smaller guys ... so we are always looking.”
The result: Marshall had just 11 catches on 23 targets from Wilson with many alarming dropped passes in seven games for the 2018 Seahawks. They cut him before he got through October of his only Seattle season, his last in the NFL.
5. Josh Gordon
The prologue: Gordon got waived by Belichick and New England after during the 2019 season. That was after the Patriots had traded with Cleveland to get him in 2018 and stuck with him through his eighth suspension for drugs, in December 2018.
What Carroll did: He saw what he saw in Marshall the year before: a huge, former All-Pro receiver for Wilson to target down the field. He claimed Gordon off waivers, when none of the more than two dozen other teams above Seattle in the league’s claiming order wanted anything to do with him on Nov. 1, 2019.
In describing why he signed Gordon, Carroll shed light on his philosophy of giving guys second chances.
“Competitively, it wouldn’t surprise you for me to say I love this opportunity, to try to help him out,” Carroll said. “To try to figure out a way to give him the backing that he needs, give him the toughness that he needs, to be the understanding that he needs, so that he can find a way to really function smoothly and find his way to the best he has to offer.
“He brings a unique challenge--as everybody does. But he’s got his own set of circumstances.
“And we are going to try to be there for him.”
The result: It’s easy to say Gordon’s signing was a failure. He had seven catches in five games with the Seahawks. His brother died, in November 2019, causing Gordon to relapse. The NFL suspended him again, for violating its policies on substances of abuse and performance-enhancing drugs. The league reinstated him in December 2020, but he didn’t play last season. The league said he did not fulfill all his requirements for conditional reinstatement. He is a free agent.
But Gordon found a new home in the Seattle area, and a new life re-start. He’s said he began abusing substances in seventh grade. He left his children to move 2,500 miles west to join the Seahawks. Some of his new teammates had him over to their homes for Thanksgiving 2019. Gordon said he loved it here.
But, ultimately, he got suspended again. And he stayed suspended.
6. LenDale White
The prologue: White and Reggie Bush co-starred for Carroll in USC’s backfield through 2005. The Tennessee Titans drafted White in the second round in 2006. He was third in the league with 15 rushing touchdowns in 2008. When he showed up for his fourth training camp with the Titans the following summer, he said he lost 30 pounds—because he had cut tequila from his diet.
Then Chris Johnson became just the sixth player in NFL history to rush for 2,000 yards in a season, in 2009. That was the end of White in Tennessee.
What Carroll did: During the 2010 draft, he and Schneider swapped two later-round draft picks with the Titans to acquire White.
The result: White didn’t last five weeks with the Seahawks. He missed minicamp practices after Carroll said his running back went home to Tennessee to tend to spring flood damage there. The Seahawks released him a month after they traded for him, in May 2010. Schneider said it was obvious White was not ready to be a member of the team.
“He wasn’t doing good,” his uncle, Herman White, told me when I was writing for The Associated Press in 2010.
The league suspended White soon after Seattle released him, for four games for violating its substance-abuse policy.
White never played again in the NFL. He later acknowledged he had more than 20 concussions playing football, and abused powerful pain medication.
The Los Angeles Times reported in 2017 White was angry Carroll cut him in a phone call, rather than in person.
“I’m more mad at Pete, the Seahawk situation, because he handled it like a coward,” White told The Times.
“But,” the story noted, “he still loves Carroll.”
7. Brandon Browner
The prologue: After Browner left the Seahawks following the 2013 season, he played one season for the Patriots (including against Seattle in Super Bowl 49) and one season for New Orleans. The Saints released him in March 2016.
What Carroll did: A month after New Orleans let Browner go, Carroll tried to change Browner’s career and life. He signed him back to the Seahawks.
The result: He didn’t last the preaseason of 2016. In July of that year he was investigated in Pomona, California, for an alleged battery of the father of Browner’s girlfriend. Carroll and Schneider released him in August. He never played in the NFL again.
In 2018 Browner was sentenced to eight years in prison after he pleaded no contest in California to a charge of attempted murder of former girlfriend.
This story was originally published April 23, 2021 at 7:25 AM.
