GM: Key to Seahawks’ youth, latest roster overhaul is Pete Carroll. What’s the next move?
In the last year they’ve turned over close to half their roster. Again.
They traded their franchise quarterback, Russell Wilson, the only one to ever win them a Super Bowl. They started over at the sport’s most important position in 2022 — with a former seven-year backup for four teams. Geno Smith hadn’t had full-time starting job since 2013.
Yet the Seahawks made the playoffs. Again. They are positioned to do it this season. Again.
What does the dismantler, negotiator and rebuilder of Seattle’s roster see as the main reason for his franchise’s sustained successful through its most recent upheaval?
“I think you have to start with Coach (Pete) Carroll and his staff having confidence in the players,” Seahawks general manager John Schneider said this week, before the 2023 season begins Sunday with Seattle hosting the Los Angeles Rams at Lumen Field (1:25 p.m., channel 13 locally).
Schneider credits his coach, who turns 72 next week, the coach who hired Schneider from Green Bay’s front officer to be a first-time NFL general manager with the Seahawks. That was in January 2010, a week after owner Paul Allen hired Carroll to run all the football side of the franchise’s operation.
Thirteen years of the most sustained success in the team’s 47-year history later, Carroll and Schneider are still running the Seahawks.
They are the longest-tenured coach-GM duo not only in the NFL, but in major North American professional sports. Bill Belichick has been New England’s coach and de facto general manager since 2000. Peter Vermes has been the coach and essentially general manager of Sporting Kansas City of Major League Soccer since 2009.
But two people, coach and GM together, since 2010? Only Carroll and Schneider.
Seahawks chair Jody Allen has shown no signs of changing what her brother kept through his death in 2018. Unlike in Portland with her and her brother’s trust’s NBA TrailBlazers, Allen wants continuity at the top of her NFL franchise.
She has Schneider signed through the 2026 draft. She has Carroll signed through the 2025 season, into January 2026. By then, her brother’s Paul G. Allen Trust might be closer to mandating she sell the team. The estate might not get to reviewing and selling the Seahawks by then, a distinct possibility for an estate that large and varied (from deep sea exploration to extensive art and music collections to a space-exploration company and more). So by the start of 2026, it’s conceivable Jody Allen could offer a then-74-year-old Carroll and 54-year-old Schneider another contract extension.
“I trust our leadership to take us into the future,” Allen wrote in a statement the team released the day she OK’d the trade of Wilson, in March 2022.
Schneider and Carroll have talked often about their working relationship being the key to their continuity in Seattle. This week, Schneider talked about how he constantly churns the Seahawks’ roster knowing Carroll will lead his coaching staff in reinventing each new set of players into his messaging, and the coach’s knack for motivating each man on the team to display his greatest traits.
Schneider says Carroll excels at “really biting into their strengths, trying to help them compensate for their deficiencies and create that level of confidence in guys and we can go play anybody and be competitive, whether it’s home or away.”
Seahawks young again
Carroll and Schneider spent their first years completely turning over the franchise. That resulted in drafting the “Legion of Boom” defensive secondary, Bobby Wagner and Russell Wilson, trading for Marshawn Lynch and Cliff Avril, unearthing Doug Baldwin and Jermaine Kearse among others as undrafted rookie free agents. That brought Seattle its consecutive Super Bowls, including its only NFL championship won with Wilson as the quarterback to cap the 2013 season.
The “Legion of Boom” got older and more expensive. So did Wilson, Wagner and Baldwin. Lynch retired. Carroll and Schneider turned over the roster again from 2017-19. Then they traded Wilson to Denver in the spring of 2022.
All the while, the Seahawks have made the playoffs nine times in the last 11 seasons. The only times they haven’t under Carroll and Schneider: 2011, 2017 and 2021.
This year feels like 2012 and ‘13 to Carroll. A new franchise quarterback in Geno Smith with his new $105 million contract extension. And younger players everywhere.
Entering the 2023 season opener Sunday, Seattle has 22 first- and second-year players on their 53-man roster. That’s 41.5% of the team that is either a rookie or in his second season. Nine of those first- and second-year players are starters or regulars: cornerbacks Riq Woolen and Devon Witherspoon, defensive back Coby Bryant, running backs Kenneth Walker and Zach Charbonnet, receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba, offensive tackles Charles Cross and Abe Lucas and outside linebacker Boye Mafe.
All 10 of Seattle’s draft picks this year made the team. Eight of nine choices from the 2022 draft remain with the Seahawks, so 18 of the last 19 draft picks are still on the roster. The lone one not is wide receiver Bo Melton, a seventh-round pick last year now on Green Bay’s practice squad.
“It’s interesting, because we feel new. There is a newness about us,” Carroll said. “You can feel it and it’s been maybe part of the excitement all along. The guys are really jacked about being a part of the program and being here.
“It makes me think of leadership that the other guys have been around (Wagner, in his return from a year away, Smith, Pro Bowl veteran safety Quandre Diggs) and how they’ve given those guys a chance by having really good direction and security that we can play with younger guys.”
It reminds Carroll of his 2012 and ‘13 Seahawks teams with Richard Sherman, Wilson, Wagner and others in their first and second NFL seasons. They then went to consecutive Super Bowls in the 2013 and ‘14 seasons.
“We had pretty good success when we we’re a young team,” Carroll said. “So I’m OK with all that.”
Schneider says he isn’t done changing the roster. He hinted Monday at midweek moves, in addition to the maximum of two players the team can elevate from the 16-man practice squad by Saturday to augment the 53-man roster for Sunday’s game.
“It’s really not just 69 (players),” Schneider said. “We average about 120 transactions a year.
“So there are guys constantly coming through this building.”
His next targets to add onto: the defensive line. It remains the thinnest, seemingly most problematic area of a team that was 30th in the NFL in run defense last season.
Entering the opener, Carroll is placing a tremendous amount of run-stopping responsibility on 30-year-old Jarran Reed as his new nose tackle.
The interior line options behind Reed? Rookie draft picks Cameron Young and Mike Morris, who have been injured much of the preseason, and 2022 undrafted rookie tryout player Matt Gotel from Lakes High School on the practice squad.
That’s it.
“(We) are trying to get a feel for the landscape right now and going over the waiver wire and all that. Possible trades. We’re still constantly working on it,” Schneider said.
“I don’t think on either side of the ball, the way the league playing out right now, last several years I don’t think you have enough offensive linemen or enough defensive linemen. That’s not a slight on anybody that’s here or on other teams, it’s just the reality of it. The numbers are down over the last several years, especially in the offensive line.
“Defensive line-wise, we’re constantly looking. And we won’t stop.”
Pete Carroll’s renewed energy
It’s not only evident in the 100-yard sprints he still does each day during the special-teams portion of practices, during kickoffs.
Or in the scout-team quarterbacking he does, pump-faking and throwing into the end zone against his starting defense on Friday practices before games.
These last two years and all the young players have renewed Carroll’s energy in teaching. The former college defensive back (at Pacific) and secondary coach spends many practices in the defensive backs’ position drills teaching his step-kick technique of press coverage, of taking angles in coverage and tackling, on playing passes as they arrive at the intended receiver and so on.
“It is maybe part of the reason I’ve been so jacked about this,” Carroll said of all the Seahawks’ youth again, “because I’m constantly teaching. I’m bringing the mentality and the approach and how we do things. To get it and settle in I’ve been working hard at it, which is fun for me to do that. It’s fun for me the way we look at things and how we approach stuff.
“I’ve felt the eagerness of the guys that they’re learning and they’re growing and so, all of that I’ve liked it. ...
“All of that has just been a good, rich process getting here. And can’t wait to see how we crank it up once we get playing.”
This story was originally published September 6, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
