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Brady Henderson, ESPN
RENTON, Wash. — Seattle Seahawks players had filed into the auditorium at team headquarters for a morning meeting, but the guy running it was nowhere to be found.
This was in October of 2020, the Saturday before a road game against the Arizona Cardinals. Coach Pete Carroll had undergone arthroscopic knee surgery during the preceding bye week and a day earlier had been hobbling around the team’s Friday practice with the help of a cane in his right hand.
So you can imagine his players’ disbelief at what they saw next: their then-69-year-old head coach, bum knee and all, bursting into the room in a full-on sprint.
“He runs down the middle of the split between the seats and then looks like he’s like a deer in the headlights,” special teamer Nick Bellore said. “And then changes direction like he’s running a pro agility at the combine.”
The room erupted.
“He’s like slapping his leg and running and he’s yelling, saying he’s fine,” Bellore said. “It was hilarious because it was out of nowhere. We were all confused why he wasn’t there right when the meeting started and then he just came flying in, like absolutely sprinting. … It was hilarious. It was like the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Carroll, now 72, is out as coach after 14 seasons in Seattle, exiting with a franchise-record 147 victories with the Seahawks, including their lone Super Bowl championship. To those who played for Carroll, his legacy extends beyond all the wins to the relationships he built and the fun he had along the way.
‘I think naturally he’s that way’
Before edge rusher Cliff Avril became one of the key parts of the No. 1-ranked defense that led the Seahawks to a win in Super Bowl XLVIII and a near-repeat the following year, he had to be convinced that Seattle was where he wanted to play. As a free agent in 2013 after five seasons with the Detroit Lions, Avril was skeptical about signing with the Seahawks when his agent called him to discuss the possibility.
“Soon as I hung up with him, Coach Carroll calls,” Avril said. “He’s on the phone, he’s like, ‘Hey, what do you think about coming to Seattle? … We would love to have you.’ Just hyping me up, like big time. It felt like college again where they’re recruiting you.”
Having never met an NFL coach who spoke to players with that level of enthusiasm, a surprised Avril figured it was just a put-on. Whatever it was, it worked. Avril flew to Seattle and met with Carroll, who kept that same energy. He figured the coach would drop the act after he signed a two-year, $13 million deal.
“Now I’m thinking things are going to change because you got me, you know what I’m saying?” Avril said. “And literally every single day until 10 years later, still super hyper. I remember my first two years being here, both Super Bowl runs, and he’d have all this energy and I’d just be sitting there and I’m like, when is this going to change? There’s no way this man is this happy every single day. So I joke with him every time I see him like, ‘Hey Coach, what are you on? Because I want that energy pill, too. Because you’re seventy-some years old and you have the most energy out here.'”
Avril jokes it must be the bubble gum, the trademark accessory Carroll incessantly smacks.
“Nah, I think naturally he’s that way,” Avril said. “But I also think from a psychological standpoint, he understands that it’s contagious and he wants to make sure that every day, everybody puts their best foot forward and the only way you do that is by being happy … being energetic, enjoying what we’re doing, and you’re going to get the best out of guys.”
A neck injury forced Avril into retirement after the 2017 season, but he has remained a fixture at Seahawks practices and games. To this day, he says he has never seen Carroll drink a cup of coffee or a can of soda.
“It’s just who he is, and it took me two years to believe it,” he said. “It took me two years to believe that Coach Carroll was the energetic, happy person that he shows every single day.”
‘We’re good for lifetime’
Between the fun environment that Carroll fostered, the latitude he gave players to be themselves and the way he didn’t overwork his veterans, Seattle went from an NFL outpost to a desirable destination.
“I’m telling you,” former Seahawks linebacker K.J. Wright said, “guys just love the culture.”
And that, according to Wright, is why many wanted to return to Seattle even after leaving on sour terms.
Wright never wanted to leave in the first place. But in 2021, the Seahawks decided that after 10 seasons and the third-most tackles in franchise history, they weren’t going to re-sign him when his contract expired. He hit free agency at age 32, coming off a productive season in which he didn’t miss a game, and yet his market was minimal.
“Life was hell for me because no one was calling me,” Wright said. “I wasn’t getting any offers from any teams.”
Summer came, and his phone stayed painfully silent. Carroll called to check on him.
“He said, ‘K.J., how are you doing, man? How are you holding up?'” Wright recalled. “‘It sucks, Coach. I’m not happy.'”
Carroll told Wright to meet him in the weight room at the team facility the next day.
“It was just us two, one-on-one,” Wright said. “He explained to me the situation, my market, what they were thinking as an organization, and it wasn’t, ‘We’re going to bring you back and give you a new contract.’ It was, ‘We’re here for you. If someone gets hurt, maybe we’ll bring you back. It’ll be a vet-minimum contract.’
“It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it was what I wanted to hear at the same time.”
It was especially meaningful to Wright, he said, knowing that difficult conversations like that weren’t Carroll’s forte.
“Like, just thank you for seeing me, thank you for acknowledging my struggle that I’m going through right now,” Wright said. “I understand business gets in the way, but he reached out to me on a personal level. It wasn’t a coach-player type thing. It was a Pete-K.J. type moment. So I forever thank him for just supporting me during that battle I was going through. Hands down, he’s forever loved in my book. We’re good for lifetime.”
Wright signed a one-year deal with the Las Vegas Raiders before the 2021 season and then signed a ceremonial one-day contract with Seattle the following summer so he could retire as a Seahawk. During his farewell news conference, he called Carroll “the definition of what a coach should look like on and off the field.”
“We kicked a lot of butt together,” Wright said, “and we had some fun doing it.”
‘Pete just wanted to be one of the guys’
As part of their travel routine under Carroll, the Seahawks would head to the opposing team’s stadium after touching down in a road city, checking out the visitor’s locker room and walking around the field in order to get their bearings ahead of game day. When the weather conditions were right, venues like Lambeau Field, Soldier Field and Lincoln Financial Field served as the battleground for a running snowball fight between wide receiver Doug Baldwin and Carroll.
Baldwin — who racked up the fourth-most receptions in franchise history from 2011 to 2018 — isn’t sure when or how it started, but he does remember the time Carroll snuck up on him and dropped a ball of ice down the back of his shirt.
Ever the competitor, Baldwin went for payback.
“So I got this big snowball and chucked it at him,” he said. “I made sure I didn’t hit him hard or in the face, but he enjoyed that … I think a lot of guys didn’t recognize this about Pete just because of the nature of the business, but Pete just wanted to be one of the guys … and he was in a lot of senses. If he could put on pads and go out there and play, he would have.”
Carroll eschewed pads when he stepped in with the scout-team kickoff unit and sprinted downfield during one walk-through practice leading up to Super Bowl XLVIII. And he did the same when he would pull off one of his go-to moves at the Saturday evening team meetings — running into a dry-erase board. Bellore, who joined the Seahawks in 2019, estimates he saw Carroll do that five times.
“The way he sometimes got us motivated or tried even to motivate himself to a degree, the whiteboard was another player or a wall and he was willing to run through it,” said Baldwin. “… He was just demonstrating his energy or excitement for the game.”
The connection Carroll had with his players went much deeper than the fun and games.
“When we come into the NFL, most of us, we’re young, still trying to figure life out and not to mention a lot of us come from challenging backgrounds,” Baldwin said. “And now we’re in a different city, a different environment, away from our families with really no support system, and we look to our head coaches and our assistant coaches [because] we spend so much time with them.
“The thing about Pete that I believe separates him from other coaches and what makes him great is that he knew that, he understood that, and he spent the time to genuinely build relationships with his players. And that brought out the best in us because we felt compelled to want to succeed with him. We wanted to do well for our coach and somebody who cared about us.”
‘Pretty scene of Seahawk lore’
After weathering the only four-game losing streak of his tenure, the 2023 Seahawks were headed toward a wild-card berth when an ugly loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers in Week 17 dealt their playoff hopes a major blow. They beat the Cardinals in the finale to finish 9-8 but missed out on the NFC’s seventh seed.
Three days later, Carroll was out as head coach. The statement from team owner Jody Allen said he had agreed to transition into an advisory role with the organization, though Carroll’s comments made it clear that he wanted to remain the coach.
At his farewell news conference later that day, dozens of team employees — including several of his players — packed the auditorium at Seahawks headquarters. R&B classics from the O’Jays and The Gap Band — two of Carroll’s favorites — blasted through the speakers, helping turn a somber occasion into a celebratory atmosphere. Leave it to Carroll to have some fun while essentially getting fired.
Later that night, the celebration continued with a private gathering at Legion, a Seattle-area sports bar opened recently by Richard Sherman and Kam Chancellor. In addition to the former Legion of Boom stars, several other Seahawks past and present who played for Carroll or coached under him were on hand.
“It was a really pretty scene of Seahawk lore and heritage and background,” Carroll told Seattle Sports 710-AM.
“At one point, it’s Lawyer Milloy, Kam Chancellor, Quandre Diggs, Jamal [Adams] — all of the safeties and the DBs were all just in one big circle, you know. It just tied things together in a really gorgeous way and it was really, really fun. I felt like I was in heaven … And Doug’s standing there saying, ‘Not one of you guys could cover me.’ He said, ‘I’m open standing right here, right now.’ It was priceless. Just priceless.”
To the surprise of Carroll and his ex-teammates, quarterback Russell Wilson showed up as well, having flown up from his home in Southern California. Late in the evening, Carroll saw Wilson and Sherman together, their animus put aside.
“I’m walking out the door at the end of it and we’re getting ready to go, and Richard and Russell are standing in the doorway,” Carroll told the radio station. “And they both looked at me, said, ‘Look what had to happen for you to get us two talking to one another and having fun.’ It was a great moment.”
The following week, general manager John Schneider held a news conference to discuss the process of hiring Carroll’s replacement. He relayed the one direction that Allen had given him in the search.
“It’s clear, it’s concise,” Schneider said. “We want to keep our positive culture, everything that’s been created here.”
