SEATTLE — Go ahead. Admit it. You never considered Pete Carroll to be elite NFL head coaching timber.
Not in New York with the Jets, who fired him after only one season and replaced him with Rich Kotite. Not in New England with the Patriots, who fired him after three seasons and no playoff wins after Bill Parcells had led them to the Super Bowl.
So certainly not in Seattle, a place where football mediocrity had been as much a part of the city’s fabric as the cold drizzle, hot coffee and grunge music scene.
Because labeling athletes, coaches and teams has become as much a pastime in sports as cheering them on, Carroll was destined to be labeled as a successful college coach who could not crack it in the NFL — put on a list alongside Nick Saban, Steve Spurrier, Lou Holtz and Bobby Petrino (to name just a few).
Critics insisted Carroll’s exuberant, rah-rah coaching style never would command the respect of grown men in NFL locker rooms. It already had failed twice, after all. Why would it work on a third try?
Fired from two jobs — and despite having won two national championships at USC — Carroll was set up to become a rare three-time NFL head-coaching loser when the Seahawks hired him in 2010.
Consecutive 7-9 seasons to start his stint in Seattle did little to sway those thoughts about him, despite the fact that, because of the ineptitude of the NFC West in 2011, the Seahawks actually won the division.
But Carroll’s Seahawks are 24-8 the last two seasons, including 13-3 this year with the No. 1 overall playoff seed, and this postseason offers him the opportunity to forever change the narrative of his career, cement himself as one of the elite coaches of the last two decades.
A Super Bowl victory and no one ever can question Carroll’s methods again.
That quest begins when Carroll’s Seahawks play the Saints in Saturday’s NFC divisional playoff game at CenturyLink Field. A win over the Saints, whom Seattle routed 34-7 last month, and the Seahawks advance to the NFC Championship game, which would also played on their home field, where they are 15-1 the last two seasons.
That makes them significant favorites to get to Super Bowl XLVIII at MetLife Stadium, which sits on the grounds of the old Giants Stadium, the place where Carroll’s NFL head coaching career began and initially failed.
When he was elevated from Jets defensive coordinator to head coach in 1994 after Bruce Coslet was fired, Carroll was considered a bit of a fad with his progressive, outside-the-box coaching style that was foreign to the league’s stern, close-to-the-vest establishment.
One of Carroll’s first acts as Jets head coach was to install a basketball court adjacent to the weight room and practice fields at the team’s former training facility, Weeb Ewbank Hall at Hofstra University. After practice, he played H-O-R-S-E and conducted free throw shooting competitions with the coaches and players.
Carroll brought in Tony Meola, a goalkeeper on the U.S. National Soccer team at the time, to do some kicking. He put a soccer goal on one end of a practice field and had players take penalty kicks with Meola in net. It was quite a scene, seeing 300-pound offensive and defensive linemen in full pads toe-kicking soccer balls at Meola.
On the surface, it looked as if Carroll was more camp counselor than NFL coach, yet his Jets were on the cusp of contention in ’94 and his unorthodox coaching methods were looking like strokes of genius.
The Jets were 6-5 and playing the Dolphins at Giants Stadium for a piece of first place in the AFC East … and then the infamous Dan Marino fake spike happened.
Carroll’s Jets never recovered, spiraling to a 6-10 finish and leading then team owner Leon Hess to famously act on his curious man crush on Kotite.
Faced with the daunting task of following Parcells, Carroll was fired by the Patriots in 1999 after three declining seasons (10-6, 9-7, 8-8).
He went 97-19 and won two national championships at USC, yet credit still eluded Carroll for two reasons: Critics considered him a “just-press-play’’ coach who had so much talent he couldn’t screw it up, and his tenure was marred by NCAA sanctions related to improprieties involving former USC running back Reggie Bush.
Credit nationally for Carroll has come slowly in Seattle, but he can change all of that with a magical run the next three weeks. A Super Bowl title to go with those collegiate national championships and you will have little choice but to consider Carroll elite.