Exiting Seahawks, Pete Carroll wants NFL to champion its players more. They are the game

Jan. 11—They came to honor the coach who’s honored them.

Russell Wilson. Richard Sherman. Kam Chancellor. Bobby Wagner. Tyler Lockett. Jermaine Kearse. DeShawn Shead.

Everyone who could get there on a few hours’ notice did Wednesday night.

For Pete Carroll.

See, more than the Super Bowl title, the only NFL championship in Seahawks history, more than the franchise’s most victories, most division titles, the 72-year-old Carroll’s coaching tenure in Seattle that ended Wednesday was about his players.

That’s the legacy Carroll wants to be remembered for now that team chair Jody Allen has fired him after 14 seasons leading the Seahawks.

It’s the legacy he wants the league to follow.

“The NFL, it’s about the players. We’ve not recognized that to my satisfaction.” Carroll said Wednesday in his emotional exit press conference in which he made it clear he fought to keep his job this week, and lost. “I brought it up in league meetings a few years ago and probably surprised some people about it, but this league is about the players.

“Without those guys doing what they do, there’s nothing. It’s not about the ownership. It’s not about if coaching. It’s not about the color of the uniforms or going to the stadiums. It’s about those guys doing what they do and putting their body on the line so regularly.

“And it’s not just a statement. It’s real.”

NFL didn’t want to hear Carroll’s idea

Carroll said he brought an idea, presumably to commissioner Roger Goodell, at a league meeting. It went nowhere.

Except into Carroll’s soul. His Seahawks players were the beneficiaries.

“I brought this up years ago to the league and right to the top of the league that I felt that the league could use direction to celebrate a new focus that they were missing out on because we were into TVs and games and playoffs and all that kind of stuff, and free agency and contracts, all the things that happen, drafts, all that stuff,” Carroll said.

“The real part of the league that could give us focus and direction is celebrating the players that make this game happen, and realize and come to the understanding that you have no game without these guys. You have no level of this game without these guys. And they deserve to be seen for that.”

What does that mean to Carroll?

“Well, you’re going to look after them. You’re going to take care of them,” he said. “You’re going to see them through their careers the best way you can, make the decisions that always support their health, welfare, well-being, all that. That’s part of it.”

Carroll has told the NFL it should put more of its billions of dollars to the players. And not just current ones.

“But then as they come out of their careers, what are we doing for them? Do we let them go, now they’re on their own? Or do we celebrate them from now?” Carroll said. “Was it not worth a lifetime of support for those guys and whatever that means? And there’s so many ways to do that.”

Carroll said he’s talked Dave Baker, the now-retired president and executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, about this.

“Why could we not find ways to utilize our former players in ways all over the country and let them be ambassadors for the league and for sports and for achievement and for manhood and all the education and all the wonderful things that they could stand for?” Carroll said. “Just stay with them forever, because they played the game. We’ve got enough money, I think. There’s enough money to do that and figure it out.”

Carroll believes the NFL could have a national response team of “superhero” players, past and present, who impact the lives of people across the country in need, every day.

“But what we would create, why wouldn’t we be creating superheroes for our young kids? I think it would,” Carroll said. “Something happens around the country: Bam! Here comes the NFL and they show up on site and they’re like a S.W.A.T. team of support, love, understanding, all that.

“I thought there was so much to that and it would change the perception of the league from outside in that we understood what it’s like to care. And I think the message of sending that and what that would mean, not just to the young guys and the guys going through their years, but everybody that watches it. Everybody’s watching the NFL. So why not do that?

“I presented it, didn’t go anywhere. It was a cool thought.”

Still is.

Pete Carroll’s advice to leaders: Find yourself

Carroll didn’t know this the instant he entered coaching 51 years ago as a graduate assistant at where he played collegiately, Pacific in Stockton, California. That was when Richard Nixon was president.

He learned it through trial and failure. He was coach of the New York Jets, for one year, and of the New England Patriots, for three. He got fired from both those first head-coaching jobs.

He refined this realization studying the teachings of John Wooden, the UCLA basketball wizard and legend, and Wooden’s famed “Pyramid of Success.” That was during Carroll’s one year away from football, after the Patriots fired him following the 1999 season and before USC hired him to revive its program before the 2001 college season.

Carroll has said that year away from football is when he found himself. He learned who he was and who he wanted to be as a leader.

The rest is college and NFL football history.

He restored the dynasty at USC with an all-energy, player-empowering, unorthodox approach that had Snoop Dogg and Will Ferrell on the sideline about as often as assistant coaches. In January 2010, the late Seahawks owner Paul Allen summoned his CEO Tod Leiweke to Los Angeles to lure Carroll to Seattle with the promise of full authority to bring his entire SC program into the NFL with the Seahawks.

It won’t work, they said. The pro game, the professional athlete, won’t respond to Carroll’s blaring music, the surprise guests, his ultra-rah-rah college way.

They were wrong.

Carroll leaves the Seahawks the only coach to win a Super Bowl and a national championship in the 26-year Bowl Championship Series/College Football Playoff era.

Wednesday — inside the main auditorium he held thousands of team meetings and installed a regulation basketball hoop for team shooting competitions at those meetings at Seahawks headquarters — Carroll was asked: What advice would you give having been in this very unique position for the last 14 years, what would be your advice for anybody who comes in (and coaches the Seahawks)?

“You want me to tell the next guy how to win?” Carroll said, getting laughs.

“It wouldn’t matter whether it’s football or whatever. To me, the essence of being as good as you can be is you have to figure out who you are. And you have to figure out that and relentless effort to try and get clear about what’s important to you. What uncompromising principles do you stand by? What makes you who you are? So that if you don’t go through that process, you don’t do that self-discovery, you don’t have an opportunity to be your best because you don’t know who you are yet.

“It’s really hard for our young guys because they’re just figuring it out. But as they come through our time there, by the time they get 25, 26, we see the development. But for anybody, you have to understand what kind of player you are, you have to understand what kind of coach you are, what kind of person you are, what kind of dad you are, all the way down the line, to maximize your authenticity to be connected to the true essence of who you are. That’s what’s crucial.

“Without that you’re going to be sometimes. That’s why it’s hard to be consistently successful, because people don’t even know how they got there a lot of times. It just happens along the way. Circumstances come together. That’s to me the essence of it. That’s how I understand it.”

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