The Seahawks and 10 a.m. kickoffs: What Pete Carroll has done to fix a franchise problem
Pete Carroll and his assistants spent the bye week assessing themselves and the Seahawks.
They self-scouted. Though the head coach acknowledged four games is too early to have definitive patterns, Carroll and his staff defined their tendencies, formations and plays on certain downs and distances. Personnel packages. Run versus pass, on offense and defense. Analytics.
“Everything we can think of,” Carroll said.
“We’re looking at it from our perspective. (We’re) looking at it from our opponent’s perspective. Look at it from a historical perspective. And just try to gain as much as we can and use this week to make sure that we get a little better and a little smarter.”
One aspect of the team they didn’t need to reassess, one area they won’t change: How the Seahawks travel.
Carroll and his staff already feel smarter there.
Seattle (3-1) returns from its week off to play at the Cincinnati Bengals (2-3) Sunday. It’s another 10 a.m. Pacific Time game.
Carroll has mastered those in his 14 seasons running the Seahawks.
Including an upset victory in overtime at Detroit in week two last month, Seattle has won 15 of its last 18 games that began at 10 a.m. Pacific. The Seahawks are 16-4, including the playoffs, in the Eastern time zone since 2018. Their latest win was in their last game, 24-3 over the New York Giants in the New Jersey Meadowlands.
They are 23-9 in their last 32 games that began at 10 a.m.
Carroll has fixed what for decades was a big problem for Seattle.
Mike Holmgren couldn’t solve it. Neither could Jim Mora, Dennis Erickson or Tom Flores. Heck, the legendary Chuck Knox went 1-2 in 10 a.m. kickoffs during his final season coaching the Seahawks, in 1991.
In the three seasons before Carroll arrived from USC in January 2010 and took over every aspect of Seahawks football operations, Seattle went 4-10 in 10 a.m. kickoffs. Seahawks lost 27 of 44 such early Pacific Time games in the 2000s, the decade before Carroll took over. That included all six of Seattle’s losses in its 10-win season of 2003. The Seahawks’ playoff loss that ended that ‘03 season, at Green Bay, began at — you guessed it — 10 a.m. Pacific.
How Pete Carroll travels
How has Carroll done it?
By doing what he did to roaring success while restoring a dynasty at USC.
He flies the Seahawks into any road city that is two or three time zones ahead of Seattle two days before the game. Many NFL teams fly in the day before, to try and get in and out before any jet lag or time-zone effects may set in.
Not Carroll. For a Sunday Eastern kickoff he practices at the usual, mid-afternoon time on Friday at team headquarters in Renton. Then the Seahawks fly into their game city. If that means to Miami or New England and a post-midnight check-in to the team’s hotel, so be it. In Carroll’s thinking that’s only 9 p.m. Pacific Time to his players’ body clocks.
Then he keeps the Seahawks on their normal sleep times. They wake up about 8 a.m. or so for a 1 p.m. Eastern Time game. They have breakfast. They take early or late buses to the stadium. They begin warm-ups on the field at the same time they do for home games.
And, more often than not — way more often than Seattle used to — they win.
The 72-year-old Carroll has had assistants investigate sleep rhythms, the importance of hydration and many other factors in longer-distance travel and time-zone acclimation.
He’s not exactly forthcoming in sharing the details of his team’s travel success.
“Well, we have a way of doing it,” Carroll said. “We have a whole format of getting everybody waked up in the morning. That’s the difference, because you are playing at 10 o’clock. It’s a real committed process and everyone is tuned in, and we have to do our part as coaches to make sure we carry out the plan.
“We just minimized that factor over the years. So, hopefully we can do it again.”
Seahawks travel more than any NFL team
This all is a big deal for the team from the league’s so-called “South Alaska” outpost that annually leads the NFL in travel miles.
This year the Seahawks are again tops in the league in air miles flown, with 31,600. That’s more than all the way around the world (around the world is 25,000 miles).
Carroll calls it “our two-day process.”
He credits Seahawks vice president of coaching operations Matt Capurro for it. Capurro has been with the Seahawks since Carroll’s first season running the franchise. Before they came to Seattle, Capurro was Carroll’s director of football operations at USC. He coordinated all of the Trojans’ travel logistics for Carroll.
Yes, USC traveled two days before a Saturday game at, say, Notre Dame, or to the East Coast.
The Seahawks’ week-two victory at Detroit came with Seattle a touchdown underdog starting two backup offensive tackles, because starters Charles Cross and Abe Lucas were out injured. The Lions were roaring. They had beaten the defending Super Bowl-champion Chiefs impressively in Kansas City on NFL opening night last month. They had a sold-out crowd rocking Ford Field Sept. 17.
Then the game kicked off — at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. Geno Smith connected with Tyler Lockett for two touchdown passes, including in overtime. And the Seahawks won. Again.
It remains Detroit’s only loss this season.
Can the Seahawks do it again Sunday against Joe Burrow and the Bengals in Ohio? Cincinnati looked like itself — that is, a favorite to challenge the Chiefs again and perhaps return to the Super Bowl for the second time in three seasons — last weekend in mashing the Cardinals in Arizona.
But the Seahawks are coming off a bye. And, yes, kickoff is early, at 10 a.m. Seattle time.
The Seahawks will practice again Friday afternoon, as usual. They will take their Delta chartered jet 4 1/2 hours to Cincinnati’s suburban airport in northern Kentucky. They check in to their downtown hotel around or after midnight, 9 p.m. to the players’ body clocks.
And the Seahawks — tied for first in the NFL with 15 rookies on the 53-man roster — will renew their “two-day process” of travel to the Eastern Time Zone.
“That’s something we’ve done a lot over the years and really liked,” Carroll said. “We’re introducing that to a number of (new) players.
“We’ll see if we can max that out and take advantage of it. It’s always been good for us.”
This story was originally published October 11, 2023 at 6:40 AM.
