Pete Carroll details final meetings with Seahawks ownership

Jan 12, 2024, 10:27 AM | Updated: 4:02 pm

Seattle Sports

For the first time since early January 2010, Pete Carroll is no longer the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks.

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Carroll was officially removed from that position on Wednesday, and the team says he will now shift into an advisory role.

The first day after each Seahawks game, Carroll would join Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk to talk about what went right and wrong for his team. On Friday, Carroll joined Brock and Salk one last time to discuss his final day as head coach, and to dive into the meetings that took place and resulted in this change.

“A whirlwind,” Carroll said of Wednesday. “There’s so many people to connect with and just so many things happening, and we’re trying to do it really well and make sure that we touched all the bases that we needed to and everybody was coordinated and on it. I was up in the middle of the night just making sure that everything was right. It was very busy and the emotion was there, but it was a lot more just receiving people and coaches and players coming by, guys calling and all that kind of stuff … It was good to be active and going. And the press conference was important, and then everything that followed was very active and very moving because of all of the coaches and people that we needed to see.”

After every season ends, Carroll and Seahawks general manager John Schneider meet with the team’s ownership and decision-makers, which is now headed by chair Jody Allen, to discuss the future. That happened again this week, but instead of Carroll leaving those meetings with plenty of work to do, he left knowing he would no longer be coaching the Seahawks.

“It was very intense and really crucial. It was crucial to me that I was able to express my thoughts and my feelings about it, and my concerns about moving forward and trying to help as much as possible, to bring clarity to the decision-making and what to expect and all of that it,” he said. “I was really pleased that we had the intensity of it because it needed it. And also the depth, that we want to make sure that Jody could feel what this is and what it takes and what the expectations are that come along with this job and these decisions that you make, and how difficult it is to do this well and to do it right. It’s hard to do the coaching job well, and it’s hard to do the selection process well, to get the right guys to answer the call. So because we care so much, because we all care so much, it was really intense. And it wasn’t uncomfortable at anytime. It was just we need to get to it, and we were able to do that.”

The split was deemed a mutual decision, but Carroll said Monday to Brock and Salk that he wanted to keep coaching the team and planned to do so. On Wednesday, he reiterated that he had wanted to stay on as head coach. Carroll was asked about that on Friday.

“The first thing that we do is we go through the season and what happened and what took place, and what were the reasons why?” he said. “What could we have done better along the way, and what would be the choices to move ahead? Because you’re competing, you’re trying to figure it out. I have very, very strong feelings about what we did, and where we screwed it up and why we didn’t come through the way we wanted to and what we did well. So we just needed to touch on all of that, and the perception that the media has on the outside is not always accurate.”

Carroll said the “initial part” of those conversations is getting to “the essence” of why the season went the way it did.

“And then, OK, what is the essence of the adjustments that are necessary? And that’s where maybe we don’t see eye to eye on it,” Carroll said. “I see it one way and I think I’ve got a way to fix it, and I’m not going to kind of halfway fix it. I’m trying to fix it so it’s perfect. So I’ve got real precise and specific thoughts, and they may not see it that way. They may not agree with it, they may not see that that’s the right answer, or that’s not the answer that makes them feel good. The difficult part is if it’s really hard because they’re not football people. They’re not coaches. So to get to the real details of it, it’s really difficult for other people … That’s basically just common dynamics that you deal with.”

Carroll said he knew he was going to “be challenged” entering those meetings.

“Because every year it feels like that, that you’re gonna be challenged and you’re challenged by opinions that are kind of media opinions, because what else do people have when you’re outside of the game?” he said. “How could you know other than what you guys talk about on the radio 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 the 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. And in these meetings, these are wide open now. There’s always some strategy going on with what we’re revealing and what we’re letting out, because we have to maintain our uniqueness and the qualities that keep us separate from other teams and people and stuff.”

Listen to the final Pete Carroll Show at this link or in the player near the top of this story, or watch it in the video atop this story or at this link.