Nice guy Carroll shakes off critics to finish first again

Former Southern California coach goes from soft touch to Super Bowl champion

Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, right, dumps Gatorade over head coach Pete Carroll at the end of the Super Bowl on Sunday. Erik S Lesser / EPA

He was supposed to be too nice, too laid-back, too much of a rah-rah guy for the NFL.

That was always the knock on Pete Carroll. When people called him a “player’s coach”, what they really meant was that, sooner or later, his own players were going to pull the rug out from under him.

You heard it when Carroll got to Seattle four seasons ago – fresh off building a programme at the University of Southern California that captured two collegiate national titles, but at times more resembled a naughty fraternity – and went 7-9 in each of the first two years.

The same way you did when Carroll was run out of New York exactly 20 years earlier, like some wide-eyed tourist who had just had his pocket picked.

He proved he could dominate the college game, and his hair turned grey in the interim.

Yet you heard it again during the build-up to this Super Bowl, when Carroll refused to crack down on the star defender Richard Sherman for talking too much, or running back Marshawn Lynch for talking too little, or essentially passing off the rash of drug busts – seven Seattle players have been suspended by the league for substance-abuse or performance-enhancers since 2011 – as youthful mistakes.

“What,” Carroll said on Sunday through a widening smile, “are you supposed to say to that?”

Exactly what the Seahawks said with their play just moments earlier, making a loud statement in the Super Bowl by destroying the Denver Broncos and quarterback Peyton Manning 43-8.

“I think he does a great job of just making every day seem like it’s a championship game,” the cornerback Byron Maxwell said. “I don’t want to say it feels like a regular game, but it feels like a regular game in a sense. He does a great job of that.”

There were dozens of statistics that spoke volumes about how enthusiastically Carroll’s players warmed to the tasks. But few leapt off the page as vividly as the large Gatorade stain covering the back of Carroll’s shirt.

“If it were fake,” the receiver Doug Baldwin said about Carroll’s approach, “it wouldn’t work. You’ll run through a wall for that guy.”

It takes only a minute or two around Carroll to see why he inspires that kind of fierce loyalty. He rambles sometimes, but he always listens.

On the podium after the win, he did not gloat and, more than once, he leaned away from the microphone and off to one side to make sure he heard the questions being thrown at him from every side.

“It played out the way we wanted it to play,” he said. “All phases contributed. It was not really a question in their minds that we wouldn’t perform like this.”

Carroll rarely tears into his guys, and while his nice-guy persona worked wonders in college with young amateurs, it nearly got him laughed out of the professional game.

Coaches are hired to be fired, or so the saying goes. But the New York Jets team he inherited in 1994 – after working as an assistant from coast to coast – practically guaranteed it by quitting on him in his only season there.

They took his constant calls for shared responsibility as an invitation to take the rest of the season off. One moment the Jets were 6-5 and the next time Carroll looked up, they were 6-10. Even so, he never saw it coming.

When the Jets’ late owner, Leon Hess, finally got around to firing Carroll, this is what he reported back: “Pete was shocked. He’s a great, high-principled man. He didn’t expect it.”

Carroll was so principled, in fact, that he did not change his approach; not when he got another NFL go-round with the New England Patriots (1997-99), nor when he wound up back in the college ranks and on America’s west coast with laid-back Southern California.

He still gave his assistants a wide berth, still played his hunches when it came to both trick plays and untested players – the kind of experiments that got him mocked in the hidebound NFL – and still insisted on spreading around the responsibilities, and especially the credit.

Carroll gambled a career that he could get it right in the NFL, provided he had the right people. It involved gathering up an armful of kids and another armful of undrafted free agents.

Ultimately, it brought out the best in just about everybody who crossed his path.

“We didn’t ask them to do things that we don’t always do,” Carroll said, “and they trusted in that.”