Pete Carroll has just officially been introduced as the new coach of the Seattle Seahawks, and he seems thrilled. The Seahawks certainly are as well, and optimism runs high in the Pacific Northwest. I hope they forgive me if I do not share their outlook. Pete Carroll is a summer soldier and a sunshine patriot, and has left his Men of Troy for a nice quiet NFL hideaway.
First of all, the simple fact of the matter is that the documented statistics related to coaches who make the jump from college football to the pro game are heavily stacked against Carroll. For every Jimmy Johnson there are four or five Nick Sabans or Bobby Petrinos or, well, Pete Carrolls. Pete had moderate success (or at least not abject failure) in his first NFL forays, at his best taking a Super Bowl squad and turning it into a .500 team on the playoff fence, but still he is eager for this new “challenge” for some reason.
The tragedy of this for Pete is not just the fact that he is statistically unlikely to succeed. It is that he is giving up a position at the top of his game to try his hand at an entirely different game. Carroll has held USC at or near the top of the college football heap ever since he arrived in L.A. It was then that he found his niche. He has been coaching since the seventies, according to rivals.com, and half of it has been in the NFL, but the step from assistant coach and coordinator to head coach is a doozie, and I think we can all agree that Pete found a home not by making that step in the pros, but by heading to USC, and that he was at the apex of his profession there almost from the start.
That is where the difference lies, between what he did at USC and what he is attempting to do in Seattle. Being a head coach in the League and in the NCAA are as different as Luge and bobsledding. Sure, they take place on the same surface and the goal is to get down the hill fast, but how you get there is vastly different. There is no recruiting in the pros, and there are no salary caps in college. The NFL is structured for parity and fairness, and every head coach has to build and shape his team with only slight edges in talent and ability to exploit. In stark contrast to this is the college game, which is built to favor the haves at the detriment of the have-nots. Pete had forgettable experiences on the level playing field of the League, but he is extremely talented at building a powerhouse and constantly reloading the best new talent into his machine. Where will this skill come into play in the NFL? How does his ability to get verbal commitments in living rooms in any way qualify him to manage and guide an NFL team to victory? In this light it is clear why coaches so often have a hard time making the transition between the professional and collegiate levels of the sport. For head coaches, it’s literally a different game. Frankly, I think Pete is out of his mind to leave a dynasty for a foundering pro team with a bleak immediate future, and I can only think of one reason why he would suddenly do so with such zeal.
As we all know, Carroll’s Trojans failed this year to appear in a BCS Bowl for the first time since about 1946. It is in the wake of this “failure” that Pete has skedaddled. Today in his speech to all his stunned and disappointed fans (Southern Cal fans don’t get heartbroken, they don’t care enough) he alluded frequently to the USC expectation “to win every single game.” He says he loved it, but the way he repeats it, and focuses on it, I think Pete was starting to feel like he could no longer live up to such high hopes.
When he arrived in 2001 he found a program that had seen some prominence but was on the decline. He took some flak for a poor season that first year, but the turnaround came rapidly. Almost 100 wins and two national championships later, USC became the Team of the Decade, and dominated the college football landscape, à la the Florida State Seminoles of the nineties (ok, they weren’t quite as good as the nineties Noles). But in the past couple years the Pac-10 has started to close the gap a bit, and even Pete’s cross-town rival is no longer content playing second fiddle in recruiting, with Coach Rick Neuheisel of UCLA doing a lot of saber-rattling (but not yet enjoying any tangible results). This year, as the climate got a bit more hostile, the Men of Troy lost four times, all of them within the conference, and failed to make their preordained BCS bowl. Perhaps Carroll’s success was obtained too cheap and esteemed too lightly, for in the wake of this first disappointment, he shrinks.
He can say all he wants about new opportunities and how he can’t resist a challenge, but there are plenty of challenges ahead at USC. They have a ways to go to get back to the rarified heights they once knew, but Carroll doesn’t feel like leading them there anymore. So he is skulking off to Seattle, whose team plays as far out of the national spotlight as is possible in this oversaturated media environment, and where expectations are so low that he can’t possibly fail to meet them. It seems very telling that though he has had all manner of NFL offers every year for at least the last five, he has chosen the worst year USC had under him since his rookie season to finally accept one. He has run out on Southern Cal and left us with a half-finished story. Before we could find out if he was destined for a drop back to the pack or another return to glory, he pulled the plug and ducked the responsibility in favor of a no-lose situation.
I admit that have never really liked Carroll. I thought his time in New England was wasted and just left Belichick with more work to do. I never bought into his surfer-dude rapport; the way he got tanner and his speech and manner got younger and more “California” as he got older. I resented that he had free run of every recruit on the west coast while the Noles had to battle two other powerhouses and a few up-and-comers every year for recruits in their own state. But I had to respect what Carroll did. The excellence his teams achieved in his tenure has not often been exceeded or even duplicated, and part of me is sorry to see him give all that up. Nonetheless, I feel justified in my disdain if this is what he does in times of crisis (even a minor one). If these are the times that tried his soul, then he is a summer soldier indeed. Good coaches can take a good program and make them successful, but great coaches survive the dark nights as well as the bright days, and sustain programs through feast and famine. I never wanted to admit Pete was a great coach, and now it looks like I won’t have to.
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