Former Jets, Patriots, and Seahawks coach Pete Carroll currently doesn’t have a job in the NFL. And he’s fine with that, even if he knows he could still do it.
“I could coach tomorrow,” Carroll told Dave “Softy” Mahler and Doug Baldwin of KJR in Seattle on Tuesday. “I’m physically in the best shape I’ve been in in a long time. I’m ready to do all the activities that I’m doing and feeling really good about it. I could, but I don’t really — I’m not desiring it, you know, at this point.”
Could that change?
“This isn’t the coaching [hiring] season,” Carroll said. “We’ll see what happens. I’m not really — I’m not waiting on it, at all. I’m going ahead, I got other things I want to do that I’m excited about and I’m gonna see how all that goes. . . . If it’s been forty-something years, 48 years or whatever coaching and that’s it, I feel OK about that.”
Carroll turns 73 next month. He drew no interest after being nudged out as the Seahawks coach, after 14 seasons, two Super Bowl appearances, and the franchise’s lone NFL championship. He absolutely should be in the mix for future jobs, even with the league’s not-so-subtle bias against coaches on the wrong side of 70.
For now, he’ll teach at USC in the spring and he’ll consult with multiple teams in other sports. He’s supposedly a consultant with the Seahawks, but that always felt like a face-saving move for the organization that decided to move on from Carroll before he was ready to go.
Maybe he won’t be teaching that course, after all. Maybe, once the 2024 season ends and the good teams and bad teams emerge and some of the bad teams decide to try to become good teams by hiring a new head coach, maybe someone will realize that Carroll is the kind of proven commodity that can make a difference.
For Bill Belichick, who is younger but not by much than Carroll, age is never mentioned as an impediment. For Belichick, the question is whether a team will give him full control or whether it can trust that he’ll be an effective coach without it. For Carroll, there’s no issue as to whether he’ll overpower the front office and ignore titles and job duties.
Regardless, most NFL teams are always looking to go younger and fresher (which also, frankly, is cheaper) when it comes to finding a new coach. Maybe a team that wants to go from being an also-ran to a contender will decide that older and proven and experienced and effective is better than rolling the dice on a coordinator who has never been the coach in charge, and who (like many coordinators do) will fail.