14 lessons from 14 seasons under Pete Carroll

What can Seahawks HC Mike Macdonald learn from every Seattle season under Pete Carroll? Seaside Joe 2011

The Seattle Seahawks start the Mike Macdonald era in less than one week. It has me thinking of the previous 14-year era under Pete Carroll and what lessons Mike, John Schneider, and the Seaside Joe Seahawks fan community can take away from each iteration of the team since 2010.

Share your own takeaways and lessons from each season in the comments section.

Join Seaside Joe’s premium bonus club for $5 per month or $55 for an entire year (you’ll be paid up between now and Week 1, 2025) and not only are you getting loads of Seahawks-only content (more BONUS content here than you’ll find TOTAL content anywhere else), you’re also supporting a mom-and-pop Seahawks newsletter business.

2010 - It isn’t over until your season is over

You’d rather be the worst team to win a playoff game than the best team to miss the playoffs.

2011 - Growth isn’t always found in statistical changes

I’ve mentioned this game a lot—because I felt like I could tell during it that even if Seattle didn’t make the playoffs that season, they had the pieces in place to finally win a Super Bowl—but I’ll say it again: Thursday, December 1, 2011, Eagles at Seahawks.

Seattle won 31-14 and intercepted Vince Young four times. What stood out to me was just how cocky the Seahawks secondary was that night, like there was no doubt they were going to intercept Young at least four times. The Legion of Boom was born that night (to me, at least) and yet how could anyone outside of Seattle know that this was happening unless they were WATCHING the games? Because the Seahawks still went 7-9 that year. They had practically no improvement on offense compared to 2010 even though this was Marshawn Lynch’s first full season with Seattle. (The Seahawks literally ranked 23rd in points and 28th in yards both seasons.) The defense did show statistical improvements, ranking top-10 in 2011, but it wasn’t like we could have predicted that Seattle would rank 1st over the next four seasons.

You had to watch to know, but if you watched, you knew.

2012 - Teams can do a midseason 180

If it wasn’t painful enough to watch the Seahawks drop to 4-4 on a last second touchdown pass from Matthew Stafford to Titus Young, then Seattle’s 24-21 loss to the Dolphins a month later could have felt like a deathblow to not only the season, but also Carroll’s coaching career. I do remember writing the next day that no matter how much it felt “over”, the Seahawks still had five more games to change the narrative of their season and that I wasn’t going to give up until the season was officially over.

First 11 games: Seahawks ranked 23rd in scoring (19.9 PPG), 3rd in points allowed (16.8), +34 point differential

Final 5 games: Seahawks first in scoring (38.6), first in points allowed (12), +133 point differential

Seattle doubled its scoring output and regardless of how good they were prior to Week 13, the Seahawks were the best team in the NFL that season based on how they finished the regular season. To me, this is no different than the 18-0 Patriots losing in the Super Bowl, that’s how good Seattle was when they went into the playoffs. Unfortunately, as will be a common theme here, the quality of your team can be superceded by the difficulty of winning playoff games on the road.

2013 - Momentum carries year-over-year (sometimes)

This feels like a thing I should not write because I actually don’t really believe in momentum in the way that a lot of fans do, especially year over year. However, there are always exceptions or cases that sure do feel EXCEPTIONAL.

The Seahawks who carried over from 2012 to 2013 knew that they let a Super Bowl opportunity slip out of their fingers the previous season and I don’t think players like Russell Wilson, Lynch, Doug Baldwin, Bobby Wagner, Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor, Richard Sherman, etc., would have let any newcomers (Michael Bennett, Cliff Avril, etc.) bring doubts or negativity into the locker room that year. “Oh the Seahawks, they never win…”

Seattle was SO DOMINANT at the end of 2012 that players who had yet to even turn 25 were now seen as veterans who you didn’t want to fuck with, for lack of a better swear word. Normally going 11-5 and losing in the second round of the playoffs doesn’t breed a lot of hope that the team will be a dominant Super Bowl champion by the next year, but I don’t think it surprised anyone when Seattle mostly marched through the 2013 season as the best team in the league. And those who felt that the Broncos were the best team in the NFL (which was still most people going into that game) showed those fans of will what will(son) really was.

2014 - You’re never the same team, week-to-week

When I think of the 2014 Super Bowl, I don’t think of a play. Not even the play. I think about how Tom Brady wasn’t facing the real Seahawks defense in the second half of the game.

Cliff Avril should have played at least 55 snaps, but he was only healthy enough for 34; O’Brien Schofield played 35 snaps. Earl Thomas dislocated left shoulder; Richard Sherman injured left elbow; Kam Chancellor injured left knee. I don’t take anything away from the Patriots for winning, that’s theirs, but you’ll never convince me that they were beating “the Seahawks defense” during that important fourth quarter comeback. You’re just never the same team week-to-week, too many things change day to day.

2015 - Heartbreak doesn’t kill the heart

Seahawks from this era, including Pete Carroll, have said that if Seattle hadn’t lost the 2014 Super Bowl that they would have won at least three in a row. Well, I call semi-bullshit on that because the Seahawks were a better team in 2015 than they were in 2014. Yeah, they won more games in 2014, so they had the all-important number one seed and the division title, but by almost any measure the 2015 Seahawks were better than the team that lost the Super Bowl. Losing the Super Bowl is no excuse for shitting the bed in Carolina in the 2015 divisional playoffs. The one-yard line didn’t kill Seattle’s dynasty, it was that comically bad first half against the Panthers on January 17, 2017.

2016 - Running backs matter

I can’t think of a single player who simultaneously gets more credit and at the same time less credit than Marshawn Lynch. He’s the most popular player of the 2010-2015 Seahawks, yet somehow we still let people say that he doesn’t matter because of the position he played. Lynch missed half of 2015 and admittedly Seattle found a way to score a lot of points with him out (Thomas Rawls averaging 5.6 yards per carry and looking on track to be a lucky replacement to be the long-term answer), but his retirement in 2016 (and Rawls' broken ankle) set off a painful era without a running back.

In 2016, Christine Michael led the team with 469 rushing yards. In 2017, it was Russ with 586 yards. Chris Carson gave fans some hope from 2018-2019, but his career was predictably cut short by the same injury concerns that made him a seventh round pick. He still led the team in rushing in 2020 with 681.

Drafting Kenneth Walker in 2022 in an attempt to stop the bleeding at one of Seattle’s weakest positions for the previous seven years should have been met with universal praise, but we’ve seen the dark side of analytics and for that reason I can never go fully back to that side until they admit Walker was a good pick.

2017 - Age matters, and NFL players age FAST

By 2017, Lynch and Russell Okung had departed from the offense. On defense, Chancellor and Sherman suffered injuries that would end their Seahawks careers when both were 29. Once the most talented defense in the NFL, by 2018 the leaders in snaps included Shaquill Griffin, Tre Flowers, Bradley McDougald, Justin Coleman, Tedric Thompson, Quinton Jefferson, Barkevious Mingo, Shamar Stephen, Lano Hill, Dion Jordan, Austin Calitro, and Branden Jackson. The only leaders I omitted were Bobby Wagner, Jarran Reed, and Frank Clark.

The Seahawks hadn’t drafted well enough to replace their star players even though they did try to with the resources that they had at the time. If Seattle had the benefit of hindsight and knew they’d eventually be bold enough to trade Wilson, perhaps they would have done so a few years sooner.

2018 - You can’t let teams run all over you

Great example of teams not being judged by their win-loss record alone: The 2018 team had the same 11-5 record as the 2012 team, but these weren’t the same Seahawks. The defense was flat out BAD, but especially against the run (30th): It was fitting that Seattle lost in the playoffs that year because of a third-and-long run by Dak Prescott.

2019 - If you’re not first, you’re last

In Talladega Nights, Ricky Bobby eventually finds out that his dad didn’t say the words he lives his life by “If you’re not first, you’re last”. (“There’s also second, there’s third. Hell, there’s even fourth!”)

Well, maybe that works in comedy racing movies. It doesn’t work that well in the NFL. The Seahawks have won the division 11 times in franchise history and in those 11 seasons they’ve won at least one playoff game eight times. (A ninth case, 1988 against the Bengals, they had to go on the road despite winning the division, and they lost.)

When Seattle finishes in first, they have really good odds to at least make the second round of the playoffs and decent odds of reaching the Super Bowl.

When Seattle finishes in second, and have to go on the road in the playoffs, the odds are too heavily stacked against them: Out of 38 seasons in which the Seahawks did not win the divison, they’ve made the playoffs nine times, reached one AFC Championship game, and never made the Super Bowl. A wild card isn’t going to do it and getting lucky in the first round only meant two more road games to get to the Super Bowl.

Also the Seahawks were still terrible against the run: Seattle gave up over 100 yards rushing in each of their last four games (worst run D in the NFL at that point) and then in each of their playoff games.

Were it not for facing an Eagles team starting Josh McCown in the wild card round, the Seahawks probably wouldn’t have even been given the luxury of losing to the Packers in the divisional round. Conversely, Seattle’s running backs in those two games (Lynch, Travis Homer) combined to have 32 carries for 58 yards.

2020 - Never let the fans ‘cook’

I’ll get to this in 2023, but I’ll preview it now: Pete didn’t like outside opinions, but then somehow “Let Russ Cook” was allowed to manifest itself into a philosophy for Brian Schottenheimer’s 2020 offense. A juggernaut for a while, the Seahawks offense was horrifically inconsistent in the second half and just flat out bad by the time Seattle lost 30-20 in the wild card to an injured and demoralized Jared Goff.

2021 - You’re never ‘one player away’

Seattle traded for Jamal Adams in 2020, but unlike the 9.5 sacks of a year earlier, there was nothing for us to hold onto as a reason for why the trade was “good” anymore. And I really wanted the trade to be good. Pete clearly thought he was trading for a different safety than the one the Seahawks meant to acquire and while I understand the thought process (Adams should be better than most 25-year-old players that can be drafted late in the first round), it was too many eggs in one basket.

If you think you’re one player away, it just means that you’re not “there” yet. And if you’re not there yet, you have no idea how many players away that you actually are. But it’s never one. (I’ll concede that a QB could be “one”.)

2022 - You’re never ‘one player dependent’

On the other hand, you’re also never just one player. The Seahawks made the boldest trade decision in NFL history by trading a 34-year-old franchise QB who should have at least five or six more years in the tank. To my knowledge, no team had ever done anything like that before. We’ve seen QBs traded when they’re too old (Joe Montana) or when they’re young and they didn’t pan out right away (Brett Favre), but never in the prime of their career. Even Stafford, he went to the Lions and he demanded that they trade him, which Detroit was more obliged to do because he had an injury history and it wasn’t like the team had ever won with him before. That’s much different than a consistently winning team trading its Super Bowl-winning quarterback.

But the Seahawks did it, and did it without replacing Wilson with a like-appreciated QB, yet they got better the next year with Geno Smith. Seattle has never wanted to believe that football is about one player, even a QB, and for the most part I think that philosophy has worked for them.

2023 - Belief has a limit, sometimes you need talent

Carroll’s greatest strength could also be his greatest weakness: He believes so hard in his players and asisstant coaches that sometimes he overlooked how badly the Seahawks needed to replace some of his favorite players and assistant coaches. I don’t intend to point fingers at just one example, but I still have a hard time believing that Ken Norton, Jr. was the defensive coordinator for FOUR years. Four years without being top-10 in scoring defense, three of four years not being top-20 in yards allowed, back-to-back years with Seattle ranking 31st in pass defense.

And Carroll’s answer to finally get some fresh ideas for how to fix the Seahawks defense was to…promote Clint Hurtt after he had spent the previous five years working under Carroll, and the last four under Norton.

That’s just one coaching example, but you know that Carroll had so much faith in his choices, whether that be personnel or coaches, he had a really hard time letting go or seeking outside opinions. Where was that head coach who fired offensive coordinator Jeremy Bates after one season?

2024 - ???

You tell me:

For the second year in a row, there is a Seaside Joe fantasy league for people in the community here who want to participate in fantasy football with one another. Jonathan F. sent me the message to get one started and created a league for anyone who wants to join:

Join Jonathan F’s Seaside Joe Fantasy League

The league has 8 open spots, but if you’re unable to join because it’s full then please leave a comment or send me a message and I’ll see what Jonathan can do about expansion.