He was supposed to be too nice, too laid-back, too much of a rah-rah guy for the NFL.
That was always the knock on Pete Carroll. When people called him a “player’s coach”, what they really meant was that sooner or later, his own players were going to pull the rug out from under him.
You heard it when Carroll got to Seattle four seasons ago – fresh off building a USC programme that captured two national titles, but at times resembled a fraternity – and went 7-9 in each of the first two years. The same way you did when Carroll was run out of New York exactly 20 years earlier, like some wide-eyed tourist who had just had his pocket picked.
It played out the way we wanted it to play
He proved he could dominate the college game, and his hair turned grey in the interim. Yet you heard it again during the build-up to this Super Bowl, when Carroll refused to crack down on star defender Richard Sherman for talking too much, or running back Marshawn Lynch for talking too little, or essentially passing off the rash of drug busts – seven Seattle players have been suspended by the league for substance-abuse or performance-enhancers since 2011 – as youthful mistakes.
“What,” Carroll said late through a widening smile, “are you supposed to say to that?” Exactly what the Seahawks said with their play just moments earlier, making a statement in the Super Bowl by destroying the Denver Broncos and quarterback Peyton Manning 43-8.
“I think he does a great job of just making every day seem like it’s a championship game,” said cornerback Byron Maxwell.
“I don’t want to say it feels like a regular game,” he said, “but it feels like a regular game in a sense. He does a great job of that.”
There were dozens of stats that spoke volumes about how enthusiastically Carroll’s players warmed to the tasks. But few leapt off the page as vividly as the large Gatorade stain covering the back of Carroll’s shirt.