SEATTLE SEAHAWKS

Salk: Why Seattle is still rooting for Pete Carroll

Jan 28, 2025, 11:40 PM | Updated: Jan 29, 2025, 1:56 pm

This is unfamiliar territory.

Generally, I root for laundry. I care about my teams and my allegiance is to them over any individual who might happen to play for them. The way I figure, the only reason I ever started rooting for that player in the first place is because he or she happened to show up on the team I was already in the process of supporting.

Pete Carroll hopes to repeat Seattle Seahawks, USC turnarounds with Raiders

This can be frustrating for some athletes. Many of them feel the love and support from a fanbase and are shocked when the loyalty shifts according to their play or which team is paying their current salary. They make the mistake of believing the fans came out to see them rather than to support the team.

In some cases, they are right. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Tom Brady and a few others are so beloved (and have so many championships) that they can (at times) supersede the team and city. It’s rare, but it happens.

Former Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll is, apparently, in that elite club.

In all likelihood, you are rooting for Carroll to succeed in Las Vegas. That doesn’t mean you want him to do better at the expense of the Seahawks or that you would root for him in a head-to-head matchup (which should occur in 2026). But you generally hope he does well, and you’d probably want him to beat the three other aged coaches in his division.

If that describes you, congratulations! You are among the 96% that voted in my near unanimous X poll. Do you know how hard it is to get 96% of people to agree on anything, online? That is a staggering number and I’m pretty sure the other 4% would have voted against Ichiro for the Hall of Fame.

Why is this so clear and obvious to such an enormous percentage of fans? Here are four reasons.

Pete won

They say you’ll never forget your first, and for many (if not most) Seattle sports fans, Super Bowl XLVIII was just that. There was an explosion of joy that had been building for years. All of the disappointment and especially the frustration from the ref-aided Super Bowl loss eight years earlier led to a massive celebration. And while there were many heroes, Carroll was right in the center of all of it. He was the one who changed the culture and brought in all the other pieces. He was the architect. And, thanks to his charismatic and talkative nature, he was the public face of victory.

Even after a decade of not making it back to that mountaintop, it’s easy to remember the years of success that he had and the championship he won. He’s not “just another failure” who fell short of the goal. He is the rare and special coach who actually delivered.

In fact, he is responsible for more sustained success than any other single person in the history of Seattle sports. In 14 seasons, his teams were 137-89 with ten trips to the playoffs and 11 seasons above .500. He delivered.

Pete lost … the right way

While the glory of Super Bowl XLVIII will be remembered forever, it’s the horror of its successor, Super Bowl XLIV, that is more often discussed and debated.

Whether it’s the silly (but popular) narrative that they should have given it to Marshawn Lynch, the debate over why they were throwing to a fourth receiver while asking Jermaine Kearse to move Brandon Browner of all people, or my question of why they didn’t utilize either the threat of a handoff for play action or the speed of Russell Wilson on the edge – everyone has a theory. Heck, even this week, eleven years later, I heard a compelling theory that it was mostly Wilson’s fault.

Related:Marshawn Lynch causes a stir at Pete Carroll’s Raiders press conference

But whatever you think of what happened in those fateful moments in Arizona, you have to admire how Carroll handled them. He took public responsibility and managed to explain his thinking without making it seem like he was purposely taking the blame for someone else. It wasn’t phony. He talked about it with his team, and while there were players that would never get over what had happened, most were able to continue to play hard for their coach. That he was able to win ten games plus a playoff win in each of the next two seasons is spectacular and speaks to his coaching prowess.

Teams that lose the Super Bowl often fall out of the playoffs the next season. Pete’s team didn’t just lose – it lost in perhaps the most agonizing fashion ever and still kept fighting and winning.

Pete is just different

He’s not from Seattle, but he certainly embraced it here. He didn’t leave for greener pastures, instead staying and living here for another year after he had been dismissed by the franchise. He didn’t pout about being fired nor did he offer anything other than encouraging words to those that remained. He didn’t want to leave the organization in the first place; he fought instead to stay and still felt he had more to prove.

And when he coaches this season at 74 years old, it would be hard not to root for the man who is trying to once again show that his culture, his competition and his devotion to old school principles on the field with new-age philosophies off of it can work anywhere he sets up shop.

The Seattle Seahawks are in good shape

It might be harder to root for Carroll if he had left the Seahawks in bad shape. But, in fact, the opposite is true. I think most Seattle fans are happy with Mike Macdonald and the direction of his team.

While nothing is perfect, it seems like they successfully navigated the difficult process of hiring a new coach and got the right man for the job. It’s safe to have a rooting interest in Carroll’s future because it doesn’t compete with our own (he is, after all, in a different conference) and because we feel like the Seahawks are on the right path themselves.

This isn’t a situation where Carroll failed here and could succeed somewhere else. It’s not that he abandoned us. And it’s not like he still has a whole career in front of him or that his success would point out issues that he left behind. I’ll be rooting for Carroll, and it’s cool to know that most of Seattle will be too.

More on the Seattle Seahawks

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Salk: Why Seattle is still rooting for Pete Carroll