Farewell to Pete Carroll

 

                                                Farewell To Pete Carroll

The Seattle Seahawks made longtime coach Pete Carroll a `special advisor’ two days after the 72-year-old Carroll announced he had no plans to leave coaching. Kudos to Channel 7, which accurately posted a cutline under a Carroll interview which read accurately ‘Carroll Fired.’

Seattle nation- `the 12’s’- registered their displeasure on social media. Well, some of them did. After all, Carroll’s the winningest coach in team history, including two Super Bowl appearances.

But it was a different story 23 years ago when the New England Patriots announced they were relieving Carroll of his duties after three seasons with the team.

Ironically, Carroll’s 27-21 mark as Pats’ head coach was the second-best winning percentage in the team’s history behind guess who? - Bill Belichick. But author Jeff Benedick reflected the feeling of most New England fans in his book, Dynasty, a history of the Patriots since the mid-90’s (the arrival of Coach Bill Parcells and owner Robert Kraft) when he refers to the `disastrous Pete Carroll era’ in New England.

After being fired by the New York Jets after one (6-10) season, Carroll replaced Parcells, who led the Patriots to a Super Bowl and made many Pat fans feel like they were finally a respected NFL franchise as opposed to the ugly red-headed stepchild they’d been since the team’s inception in 1960.

Carroll did make the playoffs in his first NE season (with Parcells’ players) but the team got gradually worse under his tenure and Carroll was let go after the 1999 season.

“A lot of things were going on that made it difficult for (Carroll) to stay on,” said Kraft in Dynasty. “Things that were out of his control.”

Translation: one of Carroll’s biggest problems; he wasn’t Bill Parcells and Kraft would have been run out of town if he hadn’t fired Carroll. (Kraft liked Carroll- most people like Pete- but hated Parcells). And he certainly wasn’t Belichick- who led the perennially stumble-bum Patriots to a 100 Super Bowl victories in this century (well, actually six in nine appearances).

As a New Englander, it’s fascinating to see how Pete reinvented himself in Seattle. Benedict writes about how undisciplined the Patriots were at that time- players waltzing into meetings late, etc. Fast forward almost 15 years; the Patriots are playing the Seahawks in the Super Bowl and Seattle’s Richard Sherman noted, “you can be an individual playing for Seattle (and Carroll) which I don’t think you can be in New England.”

My personal encounter with Carroll goes back to the late `90’s when I covered a Massachusetts high school playoff volleyball game between Bellingham (right next door to the paper I worked in Woonsocket, RI) and Medfield.

I’d heard that Medfield had perhaps the best player in the state- Jaime Carroll. Lo and behold, when I arrived at the game, there was Pete Carroll, and I assumed his wife, sitting behind the Medfield bench. It didn’t take Lieutenant Columbo to figure out that Jaime was Coach Pete’s daughter.

Pete Carroll’s appearance at the game was noteworthy. The match was Friday night and the Patriots had a big game on Sunday with division rival- the Buffalo Bills. Football lore has long praised coaches like Dick Vermeil and John Harbaugh who would sleep overnight in their offices the week before an important game. It’s long been speculated that Belichick has coached forever because he really doesn’t have any interests besides football.

The fact that Carroll was at his daughter’s volleyball game in the middle of football season ties in with the perception many Seahawk fans have of Carroll- that he realizes there are other things in life besides coaching in the NFL. More importantly, he held the door open for me as we left the gym that night.

Pete Carroll was fired by the Patriots and Jaime Carroll received a volleyball scholarship to USC. The feeling in New England was that Pete might hook on with another NFL team as an assistant, but his head coaching days were over. He’d been fired twice.

There were even some jokes that maybe Carroll would become the USC football coach since his daughter was a star athlete there. The unlikely happened when the Trojans’ head coaching became open and three big-name college coaches – Dennis Erickson, Mike Bellotti and Mike Riley- turned down the job.

Mike Garrett, the USC athletic director, wasn’t a Carroll fan, but an assistant AD had been a scout for the Jets, and recommended Carroll for the job.

The rest, as they say, is history. Carroll started off his first season- 2-5- and some Los Angeles media predicted that Carroll would be gone after one season, a repeat of his Jets’ experience. But USC finished 6-6 and two years later, won a national title. They actually won two consecutive national titles, but were stripped of their 2004 crown because of Reggie Bush taking cash from alumni.

To Patriot fans, Carroll’s three years at the helm were like the year on Dallas where Bobby Ewing died in the first episode and the last episode revealed it was all a dream. Certainly, the team had its greatest successes after Carroll left. But if you’re a Seahawk fan, your teams’ best years were under Pete Carroll. The team made the Super Bowl two consecutive years and won its only world championship under Carroll. 

Plus, the Seahawks’ success captivated a city that supposedly cared more about Hendrix and Cobain than the Legion of Boom. Everybody was one of the `12’s.’ Seattle fans will always fondly remember Pete Carroll.