Most Seahawks fans actually did not want Pete Carroll to be fired
If Jody Allen did what fans wanted, Pete Carroll might still be the Seahawks head coach: Seaside Joe 1776
I had an epiphany about NFL head coaches on Thursday. Maybe it’s something obvious to many of you, but to me it could be why the Seahawks fired Pete Carroll and who they are searching for as his replacement.
What if—and I’m mulling this over, I’m not married to it—the NFL is made up of a handful of GREAT coaches, a handful of BAD coaches, and then about 22 other head coaches who fall in the middle?
As we’re talking about who the Seahawks should hire as the head coach over the next couple of weeks, I’m betting that the FAN/MEDIA conversation and speculation will center around finding someone who will fall into that exclusive category of “GREAT”…even though realistically there might only be one of those hirings every 3 or 4 years. (Pete Carroll was once one of them.)
It might be more prudent to say that the Seahawks search will be more focused not-hiring a head coach who could be “TERRIBLE”.
This is where names like John Harbaugh could fall off the list of prospective candidates. Not because they’re afraid he sucks, which obviously nobody believes, but if Seattle doesn’t need to swing for the fences then they can extend a hard commitment to someone who they know is at least good and that’s where names like Dan Quinn and Mike Vrabel start to make a lot of sense. If not for you, then maybe for the Seahawks.
What’s wrong with the middle?
Maybe there’s just not a significant gap between the sixth-best coach and the 26th-best coach. And maybe teams aren’t necessarily focused on trying to hire a “great coach”, they’re actually doing the homework to make sure that they don’t end up with one of the terrible ones. The Urban Meyer, Hue Jackson, and Matt Patricia types of mistakes. Do you really need “the next Sean McVay” more than you need to avoid “the next Bobby Petrino”? McVay can only win so much and it’s not a whole lot more than a coach who is fine.
Because as average as “average” sounds, average head coaches win Super Bowls too: Doug Pederson. Gary Kubiak. Bruce Arians. To name three.
These are respected, Super Bowl-winning head coaches…who won’t get near the Hall of Fame. And who cares? If tasked to name the five best ACTIVE head coaches in the NFL today (so not Belichick)—let’s say for argument’s sake McVay, Kyle Shanahan, Mike Tomlin, John Harbaugh, Andy Reid—that’s three combined Super Bowl wins in the last 10 years, two of those belonging to Patrick Mahomes. Hiring the next Shanahan or McVay will make a team competitive. But hiring Sean McDermott, Kevin Stefanski, Dan Campbell, or Mike McDaniel COULD ALSO MAKE A TEAM JUST AS COMPETITIVE.
In my opinion, Brandon Staley was not a worse hire than McDaniel, yet one of them was fired midseason and one of them is in the playoffs. So why do I think this? They were tasked with totally different assignments: Different ownership, GMs, players, and schedules. Staley had back-to-back winning seasons to start his career, same as McDaniel. We’re judging them on details (statistics, what did you do for me lately) and a year from now McDaniel could be fired…or he could win the Super Bowl.
I think the gap is that small between most coaches, but we treat it like they don’t even belong at the same banquet.
Those Super Bowl wins and appearances do a ton to leverage the narrative of how great a coach is, but can be misleading when it comes to telling a story about a person’s ability to build a culture, a program, and a philosophy that hundreds of players will buy into.
(“There aren’t hundreds of players on a roster, what’s Seaside Joe seaside smoking?” Right, but you have to bring in new players every year, if not every month…Pete Carroll had to get players to buy into his program in 2010 and 2023 just the same.)
I mean, without a Super Bowl win to his resume, is Jon Gruden even an average coach?
Aside from inheriting a roster that was predisposed to winning the Super Bowl in 2002, Gruden’s coaching career is paved in morning eye gunk for a coach who used to draw comparisons to John Madden. If you remove just one season from his resume, this is literally Jon Gruden’s career: 105-108 career record, 2-5 in the playoffs, no playoff wins in the last 20 years, three seasons with 11+ losses.
I know most people had already lost respect for Gruden, but he could legitimately be one of the worst head coaches to ever win the Super Bowl. Do we talk about him like that?
When a coach wins the Super Bowl, that championship (or if he’s lucky, championships) creates a plot point in his story that supercedes almost anything else.
“Mike McCarthy won a Super Bowl, so therefore he had to get a job when the Packers fired him.”
“Doug Pederson won a Super Bowl, so therefore he had to get a job when the Eagles fired him.”
“Tom Coughlin won TWO Super Bowls, so therefore he has to be in the Hall of Fame.”
I mean, maybe. (Coughlin didn’t win a playoff game in any of his other 13 seasons during this century.) The point isn’t that teams should avoid McCarthy, Pederson, or Coughlin type coaches, but instead that these were examples of hires that didn’t hurt the franchise and did lead to championships.
If the Seahawks hire Quinn, I won’t be thrilled….and that will be the point.
If the Seahawks hire one of the top coordinators, like Ben Johnson or Mike Macdonald, my football senses will be overly titillated…
And Johnson or Macdonald could end up being one of those rare coaching hires that sets in motion a brand new NFL coaching tree with ripples that last for decades, Super Bowls, and innovation…which is very cool and exciting and why I think most fans are hoping to hear a name like one of those. INCLUDING MYSELF.
But that’s like needing $1,000 and buying a scratch ticket instead of getting a job. Winning the lottery is a better story, getting a job is more efficient.
So then why did the Seahawks fire Pete, Joe?
If I’m right about this and if the Seahawks understand that most coaches in the league are separated by fractions of luck instead of oceans of playbooks, then it sounds like ownership started to think that Pete Carroll is actually a net negative as a head coach. Not that he’s not great anymore, but that’s he’s actually not even average anymore.
As hard as that is to fathom given Pete’s history and Seattle’s very average win-loss record in the last three years, especially with obstacles in between him and the Super Bowl like a mediocre roster on defense and two successful teams in the same division, I don’t know if the Seahawks would have fired Carroll unless they actually started to believe that he’s bad.
Again, this may seem obvious—”fired=bad”—but if Jody Allen was convinced that Pete Carroll is no worse than 75% of the NFL, wouldn’t it have made more sense to keep him than to risk losing a good thing for a Joe Judgement?
Pete Carroll thinks he should have kept the job. So do most Seahawks fans, apparently.
Part One: 8 offensive-minded head coaching candidates for Seahawks!
Seahawks fan survey: Keep Pete!
On Tuesday, before it was announced that Pete Carroll had been fired, I ran an end-of-season survey for Seahawks fans. With 475 response—and most of these were submitted before the news broke—almost two-thirds of Seahawks fans did NOT think Carroll should be fired: 63.6% to 36.4%.
This flies in the face of another narrative, the one being that Seahawks fans wanted the Seahawks to replace Pete (which I could see as the top comment on most YouTube videos or tweets about the team or Carroll in the last few weeks of the season), when in reality there might not have been much blowback from letting him keep the job he wanted to keep. Even Carroll noted on Friday that Seattle’s ownership was relying too heavily on “media opinions” when he was arguing to stay on his head coach and they ultimately disagreed he was best for the job.
As transcribed by ESPN’s Brady Henderson:
“Every year it feels like…you’re going to be challenged by opinions that are kind of media opinions, because what else do people have when you’re outside of the game? How could you know other than what you guys talk about on the radios and what the articles say and what the pundits are drawing conclusions on? That’s why you have to go in realizing that that’s what you’re dealing with and then try to talk through to get to the essence of stuff. That’s always going to be a challenge because when you don’t have legitimate dyed-in-the-wool football people calling shots, then you have to try to make sense of it, just like we try to make sense of it for your audience, it’s no different.”
Pete’s saying that Jody Allen/Vulcan analyze the job he’s doing the same way that you and I do: They watch the games with untrained eyes, pay attention to the narratives, and then make the franchise’s biggest decisions with the exact same amount of information and opinions that you or I would if we owned the Seahawks and controlled Pete’s fate.
I don’t take offense to Pete saying that I’m untrained or that my opinions lack important context, information, and experience because I believe what he’s saying to be 100% true. I ALSO recognize that he’s biased and inclined to keep telling me every year that he’s the best coach for the job—same as Urban Meyer would do—but I respect what he’s saying about Seattle ownership potentially putting too much stock into what “they” are saying (I shudder to think that Jody follows Ben Baldwin on a burner account or something) instead of evaluating the staff on a black-or-white, pass or fail, good or bad football grade sheet.
Because Pete Carroll is one-million percent not one of the “terrible” NFL head coaches and while the narrative could imply that Seahawks fans were pushing for Jody Allen to make a change, our survey flat out says that fans weren’t
Rest of Survey Answers
In the interest of page length, I will post the rest of your answers to the survey soon—who you like the most as the next head coach, your offensive and defensive MVPs, pie-in-the-face winner!—so the only way to guarantee you don’t miss it is to be subscribed to Seaside Joe:
Whelmed at the Helm
The four most-recent outside coaching hires by the Seahawks made a huge splash: Tom Flores was a two-time Super Bowl champion (see: Coughlin, Tom), Dennis Erickson was a two-time national champion, Mike Holmgren was a Super Bowl champion with back-to-back appearances, and Carroll was either a one or two-time national champion, depending on your trust of computers.
With this type of track record, you’d expect Seattle to target Harbaugh or Belichick. Not that you want that or think Bill Belichick would ever coach the Seahawks (how can we imagine Belichick anywhere other than New England, no matter where he lands?), I’m just saying that is what the last 30 years of hires looks like outside of Jim Mora, Jr.
But if Pete’s comments on the franchise taking “media opinions” too seriously is true, then Dan Quinn, Mike Vrabel, Ben Johnson, and Mike Macdonald are not names to be ignored; Quinn because he’s connected to the Seahawks, Vrabel because Twitter freaked out when he was fired, and Johnson/Macdonald because they’re coordinators getting the most interviews and have “the fans” clamoring the most for their services.
As we’re finding out, appearances and reality are not always one in the same.
I think almost any head coaching hire could win a Super Bowl, so long as the team drafts the right players. So instead of focusing on the name who we think will win Super Bowls, which could be any number of head coaches—
Just cross your fingers that the team doesn’t hire someone who won’t win anything.
I was one of the folks who felt it was time to move on from Pete. But it wasn’t because I thought he was bad / sucked. And as much as I love football, I wouldn’t put myself in the “football people” camp.
My reason for wanting to move on was based purely on the results and lack of progression in drafting / signing talent as well as player development. Being the HC and VP of player ops is a double edged sword, “with great power comes great responsibility “, and in Pete’s case he is ultimately responsible for the results good or bad.
I am just ready to see something different when it comes to my favorite football team. I understand the logic in keep JS, who I think disagreed with Pete more than we know, based on the recent drafts. I would also like to see us go for the Ben Johnson type candidates that have long term potential and could be our coach for the next 20 years!
A bit off-topic but something I’ve been wondering: was Russ’s surprise visit to Pete’s bar party a bit like a fart in church?