Yesterday, January 11th, 2024, Pete Carroll transitioned from the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks to the former head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. Carroll’s achievements and legacies as a football coach are too numerous and great to try and summarize here. Suffice to say it is fair and accurate to note that while yesterday marked the end of the most successful tenure of any head coach of any major American sport in the region’s history, it was not even particularly close to Carroll’s most successful tenure as a football coach. 

You can list the accomplishments any number of ways: 10 playoff appearances in 14 seasons. Five NFC West titles. Two NFC championships. The franchise’s only Super Bowl victory. But no list of facts or data will capture the visceral thrill of watching Carroll’s best Seahawks teams. While other teams succeeded through superior technical detail or schematic innovation, the Pete Carroll Seahawks used the blunt instrument of their superior athleticism and will to turn the beautiful machinery of their opponents’ gameplans into a ruinous pile of slag. When you are better than your opponent you do not need a plan. Being better is the plan. And they were better. A lot better.

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My personal favorite narrative of the Carroll Era was his slow, methodical deconstruction of Jim Harbaugh – a man as dissimilar from Carroll personally as possible but who shares a greatness for coaching and a preferred style of football that can best be summed up as “Ouch” – and his 49er teams. On October 18th, 2012 Seattle lost a brutal, physical road game to San Francisco 13-6. It was the Seahawks’ 4th loss in a row to their divisional rival, who were fresh off a 13-3, division-winning 2011. Seattle was 4-3 on the season and to that point in Carroll’s tenure 19-23. Despite the miracle that was the Beast Quake in 2010, things did not appear to be working as planned.

Then something happened between that game and the 66 days that passed before the two teams played again. A talented collection of young players on both sides of the ball coalesced into an extremely good football team. The Seahawks beat the Bears in overtime on the road to go 7-5 and then proceeded to find a Mario Kart Mega Mushroom, eternally and forever hitting boost as they obliterated the Bills and Cardinals with back-to-back 50-point explosions. 

That set up the rematch with San Francisco. The game was on Sunday night. It was cold. It was raining. It was Jim Harbaugh’s birthday. 

It was an avalanche. Not just in the sense that it was 14-0 after the first quarter, or 28-6 at halftime, or finished 42-13. It was dominance that transcended analysis, a wholly and uniquely Pete Carroll-ian all-consuming sense of victory from the very first snap to the last. Every play was an opportunity to impose will, every tackle a message. It gave us the greatest image of Pete ever.

It was here in this cauldron of success that Seattle’s home crowd ascended to the form that defines its reputation; not a crowd that cheers success, or rises to the moment to distract opposing offenses. It was an ever present, looming specter of pure sound that seeped into every crack, every ear, every dead moment of space a football game can normally find. 

There was no escape from that specter Jim Harbaugh and his 49ers, even after the final whistle. The victory announced the arrival of the Seahawks as one of the league’s best teams. It capped a three-game stretch in which Seattle outscored its opponents 150-30, which is pretty good for an SEC non-conference schedule. What came after – and there was so, so, so, much that came after – always felt like a reverberation of that initial, cataclysmic event. 

The Seahawks won 10 of the next 11 against San Francisco the next five seasons, including the 2013 NFC Championship Game, a game I believe to be the greatest game I have ever personally experienced. They then, as you know, atomized the best NFL offense in history 43-8, not only exorcising but permanently banishing the fear we would never see one of our teams win a major title. We have never had it so good, and perhaps never will again.

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There was and is always so much about Carroll’s Whole Deal that, in the words of former Seahawks Beat Writer Danny O’Neil, ranged from “a vaguely noble hope to an absolutely unattainable aspiration”. Listening to him for a moment, a game, or a season makes it easy to see why so many assumed that battle-hardened, worldly professional athletes would see right through his platitudes as the bullcrap such platitudes inevitably break down to be.

Except, with Pete, they weren’t empty. The catchphrases, slogans, and mantras weren’t an artifice carefully crafted solely to extract a temporary boost in player’s ability on gameday. They were the outpouring of a deeply held set of personal beliefs. Pete Carroll’s Whole Deal worked with more players and for longer than anyone thought possible not because it was a better deal, but because he was the most zealous disciple of his own evangelism. I imagine it also helped that he knew the hell out of the sport of football.

At the press conference announcing his dismissal as Seahawks Head Coach (and it’s clear it was a dismissal, not the mutual parting of ways that was implied by the team’s announcement) Carroll did what he always did. He took a slogan, “Always Compete”, and lived it to its fullest. Over 30 minutes Carroll competed against sadness, self-pity, and anger to instead focus his energy and attention on his players and his family. 

For the entirety of the press conference announcing his greatest defeat he pushed to turn the moment into an opportunity to focus outward; to spread thankfulness, love, gratitude, and opportunity to those around him. He did that every day he was here, and that is what I think he means by “Win Forever”. He won yesterday, and we all won every day he was here. Thank you Pete. I will never forget your time in Seattle.