Pete Carroll expects his meeting with Jody Allen will be ‘like always’ Seahawks status quo
As Thursday began Pete Carroll had yet to have his meeting with Jody Allen.
That was expected to happen later Thursday or Friday.
When the team’s coach for the last dozen years does sit down with the Seahawks’ chair and successor to her late brother, franchise owner Paul Allen, Carroll thinks their end-of-season meeting will be...
Normal.
“Like we’ve always had. Really pointed, figuring things out,” Carroll said this week.
All signs remain Jody Allen will choose status quo atop the Seahawks for 2022.
“She’s very analytical, and she wants to make sure that we’re doing everything we can possibly do to get everything right,” Carroll said. “She’s a terrifically competitive person in that regard, and she doesn’t want any stone unturned. Exactly the way I look at it.
“I just feel so connected to that thought that that’s what we do. To have your owner talk that same way, that’s a competitive perspective — and it goes back to the old line we used to have: ‘We’re in a relentless pursuit of finding the competitive edge in everything that we are doing.’”
That’s what the current chair’s brother, Paul Allen, signed up for when he sent then-Seahawks CEO Tod Leiweke to Los Angeles in January 2010 to get Carroll to Seattle from his college football dynasty restoration at USC.
“That’s what it is. That’s what she represents,” Carroll said of Jody Allen.
“We’ll try to do a great job of exchanging the information and setting course for making sure that we give ourselves the best chance to be champions.”
Allen is also the chair of Vulcan, Inc., the Seattle multidisciplinary company she co-founded with Paul Allen in 1986. Vulcan’s interests include real estate, retail, asset and support to the Paul G. Allen Estate and Trust and advising to the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation of charitable work, including wildlife conservation, ocean health and the arts.
Paul Allen’s estate and trust include the Seahawks, and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association.
Jody Allen is the chair of the Blazers. She and the Blazers are undergoing a regime change, after she fired general manager Neil Olshey last month. That was the result of her and the team’s investigation of alleged workplace misconduct within the Trail Blazers. Portland also is in the first season with a new, first-time head coach, Chauncey Billups.
It does not appear Allen wants a concurrent regime change with her other sports franchise in her brother’s estate, the Seahawks.
They missed the NFL playoffs for just the second time in 10 years. The Seahawks finished the 2021 season 7-10. They won four of their final six games, including a 38-30 upset of playoff-bound Arizona last weekend.
Still, it was Seattle’s first losing season since 2011. That was the second year of Carroll’s and general manager’s John Schneider’s complete overhaul of the franchise, into a first-time Super Bowl champion by the 2013 season.
That losing 2011 season was the last one before Carroll and Schneider drafted Russell Wilson and made him their franchise quarterback.
Some see this just-completed 7-10 season as the reason to fire Carroll, the franchise’s ultimate authority, and perhaps Schneider, his GM for all 12 of Carroll’s seasons in Seattle.
Allen can’t help but see the new contract extensions she gave Carroll through 2025 at what is believed to be more than $12 million per year, among the NFL’s richest for coaches, and Schneider through the 2027 NFL draft. She did both deals just last year.
Asked for Jody Allen’s opinion of the 2021 season, Carroll said: “She can speak for herself.”
Allen hasn’t spoken publicly or been interviewed since she became chair of the franchise upon her brother’s death in October 2018.
“She’s been with us the whole time. She’s been awesome,” Carroll said.
“I’m not going to give you any inside scoop, so don’t ask.”
The coach has for all 12 of his Seahawks years been the franchise’s top football authority, above the GM he and the team hired weeks after Carroll signed on in January 2010.
Carroll has said he has no cause for concern with his status with the team for 2022 and the foreseeable future.
“No,” Carroll said. “I’m in great shape.”
Same, he said, goes for Schneider.
“We feel, both, like we’re in great shape. I’ll speak on behalf of John on that one,” Carroll said.
‘It’s all about the fans’
Schneider had a message for fans on Jan. 2 about this offseason and 2022.
“We are going to work our tails off to get this thing turned around and get back to being a championship-caliber football team,” Seattle’s general manager said on the team radio network’s pregame show.
That was before his Seahawks played Detroit in their final home game of Seattle’s first 10-loss season since 2009.
“I would say, just, I was born and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, (and) it’s all about the fans,” Schneider said.
The day after Christmas, Seattle’s fans watched their team get eliminated from the playoffs in a dismal home loss to the also-losing Chicago Bears. That dropped the team’s record at Lumen Field in 2021 to 2-5 — 2-6 including the Seahawks’ home loss to the Los Angeles Rams in the wild-card round of the NFC playoffs 12 months ago.
The Seahawks returned Sunday night from Arizona and their season-ending win, in which Rashaad Penny rushed for a career-high 190 yards and Wilson looked at times like his vintage, 2013 and ‘14 self, running decisively for a touchdown and throwing for three more scores. Still, Seattle was the only NFC West team to not make the postseason: San Francisco plays at Dallas Sunday, and Arizona plays at the Rams Monday night in round one of the playoffs.
The day after beating the Cardinals, Carroll held a team meeting at the Seahawks’ facility in Renton to send the players off into the offseason.
“The message was...: We were able to see the team that we can become over the course of this year. We didn’t get other things done, but we did see that,” Carroll said.
“I told them (Monday) I remember telling Kam (Chancellor) and ‘Sherm’ (Richard Sherman) and those guys when they were in here years ago that in this room right now is the nucleus of a championship team that we’ll add to and we’ll bring in and support. But the guys in this room are the guys that are going to make this happen. That’s what it feels like, and we should be excited about it. I am.
“I’m excited about the chance of coming back and playing cleaner, sharper, more physical football than we did this year, more consistently. With attending to the issues that we had, we should clean those things and we should be good.
“We have a very challenging division, and we’re going to have to be really good. Like I said before, if you make it through this division, you should have chance to win the whole thing. That’s what we’re aiming at.”
Wilson, Carroll talk
Carroll’s meeting with Allen this week isn’t his only one before the coach heads to his offseason home in Maui. He meets with many of the key players on the team on every end-of-season, locker-cleanout day.
He was talking to Wilson this week.
“Maybe I’ll fly to Hawaii and sit down with Pete there. Maybe I’ll catch the flight with him or something like that,” Wilson said Sunday, joking.
“Yeah, of course (we are meeting). Pete and I obviously have a great relationship. So I will definitely talk to him and John and all that stuff, too, and we will chop it up and have some good times together.”
Wilson has two more seasons remaining on the then-NFL record $140 million contract he signed with the Seahawks in April 2019.
Incessant national rumors hint Wilson may be leaving the team this offseason. That’s on top of the constant rumors of that last offseason. Yet the 33-year-old Wilson said in the last two weeks his goal is to win three more Super Bowls, “and my plan is to win them here,” in Seattle.
Wilson said he feels with Carroll like he did in 2012, when Carroll made him the Seahawks’ starting quarterback months after the team had signed Matt Flynn from Green Bay on a big-bucks free-agent contract.
“Yeah,” Wilson said. “I think we have always been on the same page. And that same page is to do whatever it takes to win.
“That’s been our focus. It’s always been our focus since I got here. I remember coach calling me up on draft day, the day they drafted me, and said ‘Hey, you’re going to compete for this thing now,’ and I just always remember that.
“So that’s what we’re all competing for to try to be better, and that’s our focus.”
This losing season was the first one of Wilson’s career in which he missed a game because of injury. He missed three, after surgery to repair torn tendons and fractures in the middle finger of his throwing hand Oct. 8. The Seahawks went 1-2 in those games without him.
He came back too soon, in half the time his surgeon told him he likely would. Seattle lost the first three games of Wilson’s return.
That was that for the Seahawks’ playoff chances this season.
Finishing
The last two games nearly three full months after his surgery, Wilson’s throws had their characteristic, pinpoint accuracy and his play was more decisive. He still made mistakes — such as the sack-fumble and interception last weekend that handed the Cardinals two touchdowns. But he and Seattle’s offense scored 89 points the last two games. The 51 against Detroit Jan. 2 was the Seahawks’ first 50-point game since Wilson’s rookie season of 2012.
“I thought that he was at his best at the end. I thought that he really played his best down the stretch,” Carroll said of his quarterback. “He was more resourceful...
“It’s significant in recognizing that. I’m sure every day from this point forward that he will feel better and better and put the surgery behind him, which he already has, but it will be farther in the past and it will be less than a factor in any way.
“I was really excited for the finish.”
Carroll was asked, but wasn’t revealing, what he is going to tell Allen about why the Seahawks had a losing season in 2021.
“I’m going to save my special stuff for Jody, if you don’t mind...,” he said.
“But there’s some big things that showed up. The big things are the finishes (to games). We didn’t finish as effectively as we have in the past. We weren’t as explosive as we needed to be. We weren’t as clean defensively as we needed to be for that last drive, last play. ...
“We’ll talk through all of those stories. We’ll talk through the availability of players that change course for us and shifted us, losing Chris (Carson, the lead running to neck surgery) early and Russ getting banged up. Those are all just the normal things that we’ll go through. We’re digging deep into all the analytics as well to make sure we’re on track and we’re accurate. ...
“There’s a lot of stuff. But we’ve been through a lot of it together.”
This story was originally published January 13, 2022 at 5:27 AM.
