Real-life bonds with players. There’ll never be another Seahawks coach like Pete Carroll
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Seahawks’ Pete Carroll Era Ends
After 14 seasons of the most sustained success in Seahawks history, with a legacy of his players loving him and his unorthodox, personal approach, Pete Carroll is out as Seattle’s coach.
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To those outside the team, Pete Carroll’s Seahawks legacy is as clear as it is indisputable.
He won the franchise’s only Super Bowl title. He had more victories than any other coach in team history. More division titles. Nine playoff appearances the last 12 years.
Carroll created the “Legion of Boom.” Drafted Russell Wilson, Bobby Wagner, Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor, Earl Thomas, K.J. Wright. Traded for Marshawn Lynch.
Carroll picked then coached the men he helped make Seattle legends, and his franchise an NFL powerhouse.
To those who have been inside the Seahawks locker room the past 14 years, the 72-year-old Carroll’s legacy is deeper. It’s more meaningful. It’s intensely personal.
It will last them, and him, a lifetime.
His players back in 2010 will never forget how he arrived from USC with his wavy hair, his khakis, his Air Monarchs, his gum smacking. Those Seahawks from 2011-14 will cherish that through hundreds of roster moves Carroll turned a middling team that had won four and five games the previous two seasons into a division champion in year one, a Super Bowl champion within four years.
Carroll made the players NFL stars. He made them rich.
But more than that, he made them friends and brothers.
Pete Carroll’s care for players
His Seahawks players from 2021 will never forget how Carroll, a senior white man from Marin County in San Francisco’s Bay Area, raised in one of the nation’s most affluent areas, stood with them — marched with them — across the I-90 floating bridge over Lake Washington in full-throated support of racial and social inequality.
Carroll and John Schneider, the general manager Carroll hired in 2010, who as of team chair Jody Allen firing Carroll Wednesday is now the franchise’s top football authority, marched to support the event created by the wives of Wright and Chancellor.
They will remember Carroll wearing a black “WE WANT JUSTICE” shirt before a Seahawks home game.
Those players that had never voted will always appreciate the day he canceled practice before the 2020 presidential election and set up a voter registration drive right there off the practice field, so players who were registered to vote could have their voices heard to choose the next president. It was the coach’s way to tangibly affect the change his players had been demanding in the wake of the killing of Black Americans such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.
Carroll’s players may not have then, but likely now appreciate how during the pandemic, Carroll went beyond the daily COVID-19 testing the NFL mandated for players, coaches and staff that went on for two years in the players’ parking lot of Seahawks headquarters. Carroll said at the time three years ago he wanted to be, like he said of his football, the best who’s ever done COVID in sports.
The coach had the team pay for extra trailers, set up and staffed in the front, visitors’ and staff lot. He set up testing of spouses, family members, significant others, friends, whomever the players wanted to see during the coronavirus outbreak. They got the same treatment as the players: test tubes flown that day to a lab in California at team expense, results back within 12 hours.
Carroll struck a deal with his players: Tell me who you want to be with, I don’t care who, no questions asked. Just let us know, so we can get them tested. So you can stay clear of COVID-19 and on the field, playing.
Carroll said at the time he and his wife Glena were taking it as personal challenges to not contract the coronavirus. He extended that challenge to his team. He made not getting COVID-19 a part of the Seahawks’ daily competition ethos. He had competitions among position groups over who was proven to be the most COVID-19 aware and safe, who was winning at keeping socially distant.
He had the team’s food-services staff prepared whole, multiple meals for each player so they didn’t have to go out to eat—and if they did, make it take out.
For Carroll, it was a COVID adaptation of his number-one team rule: Protect the team. He called it the greatest challenge of his 50-year coaching career.
Because they trusted Carroll, the players did it. All of it.
The Seahawks became the only NFL team to be without a confirmed COVID case. Carroll got the players to hold that self-discipline and trust through all of the 2020 preseason, training camp and regular season, into the 2021 offseason, preseason and first month of the following regular season, too.
The players will always love that Carroll installed a regulation basketball hoop —with a glass, rectangular backboard and regulation rim — bolted into the stage of the main auditorium of the team’s facility. With the theme for Michael Jordan’s movie Space Jam blaring, he had offensive players face off against defensive players in shooting contests. It was Carroll taking his “Always Compete” mantra into team meetings.
They will always remember Carroll brought rap star Kendrick Lamar, basketball legend Bill Russell, famed astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and other surprises to practices and team meetings.
Last summer at training camp, Carroll brought the players an ice-cream truck. Players yelled and laughed and held both arms above their heads like 8-year-olds as they walked off the practice field with Sponge Bob popsicles and strawberry shortcake bars.
Pete Carroll’s players: ‘Heartbroken’
On day two of the players’ offseason, when he could be anywhere, quarterback Geno Smith was in row one during Carroll’s press conference Wednesday after Seahawks team chair Jody Allen fired the coach after 14 seasons.
Bobby Wagner was in row two. Tyler Lockett and Quandre Diggs were near them.
Wednesday, Wright told CBS Sports Radio: “I’m heartbroken. I’m really heartbroken” by Seahawks team chair Jody Allen deciding to send Carroll away.
“I love the guy,” Wright said.
“His players love him.”
It’s why Wilson posted on social media: “One of the Greatest Ever. ‘Keep Shooting’ Coach. Grateful for the memories. @PeteCarroll Best is Ahead.”
Pete Carroll’s proudest Seahawks accomplishment
As he said goodbye as Seahawks coach Wednesday, as he said he didn’t know what the future “advisor” role Allen mentioned in her statement the team issued meant or would be, Carroll spoke of the personal relationships being his proudest accomplishment over 14 years in Seattle.
“What I am most proud of is that we took a culture that we developed there in those college days and came here,” Carroll said. “To see if you cared for people deeply and you loved them for who they were and tried to find the extraordinary uniqueness that made them them and celebrate that, and not try to make them something that they’re not, and not to try to expect them to be something other than that, but try to see if we can capture that extraordinary uniqueness that they had and celebrate that with them, let’s see what happens.
“Well, at USC, we killed it. And we came up here, and overall we’ve been successful for a long time.”
“I didn’t think any way this would happen like this. I didn’t have that vision. But I’m grateful for it, because what we have here is we have an extraordinary culture. I’m really proud of that. The guys that are here know. The guys that come here and leave know. The guys that haven’t been here before and show up here, they’re shocked.”
Carroll addressed Smith, Wagner, Lockett and Diggs in the room directly.
“Really, that happens because you guys continue to celebrate it and keep it going,” Carroll said. “And I’m able to keep calling on you guys to illustrate what it’s all about. This is a very special place because of all of that. And I’m grateful for that. ...
“What’s always been behind the culture is trying to help people find their best one person at a time. It works. It’s real. You can feel it.
“I’m really grateful for that.”
Of the blaring music — from Rick James through techno/electronic dance music on short-shorts Thursdays to Meek Mill — plus mix tapes the players made through practices and meetings and team headquarters, Carroll said: “It’s like going into your high school class, maybe it was a history class, you had a teacher that was really unique. The music was playing or there was something going on. You could hear as you were walking down the hall and you couldn’t wait to see what was going on that day.
“That’s what this learning environment was supposed to be like, that every day you came in you didn’t know what was going to happen. Because I needed to keep you at the very peak of your awareness and focus and all that. That was just part of it.
“Teaching environment. It’s teaching. We’re trying to keep the students alive and thriving in the moments. It’s a huge endeavor.”
It was all part of it.
That’s Carroll’s legacy with the players he coached for the best 14 years Seahawks football has ever known.
“Marshawn (Lynch). Cliff (Avril). Mike (Bennett). Big Red (Bryant), all those guys. Real dude. Banger. So many guys. Mikey Morgan,” Carroll said. “Part of where we were.
“We weren’t something. Then we made something special.
“We had a run of it that just made us kind of just bond in a way that these guys know. It will never go away. It’s just something they’ll live with, which is a very special part.”
This story was originally published January 10, 2024 at 8:37 PM.
