The Quarterback According To Pete Carroll

Hint: It isn't Russell Wilson, and it never was.

Matt Hasselbeck at the end of his career. Charlie “Clipboard Jesus” Whitehurst. Tavaris Jackson. Matt Flynn.

Four names plucked at random from the Snohomish County White Pages? No. Pete Carroll’s first four starting quarterbacks in his first two seasons as CEO/Head Coach? Yes, but that’s not what specifically sets them apart.

All bad to mediocre quarterbacks whose ceiling was as game managers whose job was to not make mistakes - which is to say, not make plays - and hand the ball off to Marshawn Lynch?

Bingo.

And that’s just the way Pete Carroll likes it.

We all know what a dinosaur throwback Pete Carroll is as a football coach. He started his coaching career under the Minnesota Vikings’ legendary Bud Grant, who also had a “three yards and a cloud of tundra” view of offensive football, an orgasmic love for tough, ferocious defense, and a quarterback whose scrambling and playmaking ability gave him weekly heart attacks on the sidelines. Carroll suckled on that sour coaching milk, and entering his 71st year on this planet, in an era of bombs-away/”air raid” passing and young offensive gurus, he stubbornly and crotchetily sticks with “running the ball and playing tough defense”.

Which is fine if you build a roster to play that way. Pete did that at the start of his tenure, trading for the aforementioned “Beast Mode“ and building the historically great Legion of Boom defense that led the league in scoring defense for four consecutive seasons. It came with a single yard and historically bone-headed play call of bringing Seattle back-to-back Lombardi Trophies and a bona fide dynasty.

You may have noticed that I have, thus far, left out one prominent name from this recounting: Russell Wilson. Almost as if he was just a background character to this tale of football glory. Well, that’s because he was in Pete Carroll’s mind - and that’s all he was ever supposed to be.

Remember that the three years that the Seahawks were on top - 2012-2014 - also happened to be the years of Russell Wilson’s rookie contract. Also the rookie contracts of Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor, Bobby Wagner, K.J. Wright, etc. That’s what provided that Super Bowl window - so many Pro Bowl, All-Pro, and even future Hall of Famers on the same roster at the same time making pocket lint compared to what they were going to cash in.

But nobody cashes in like quarterbacks do. And while Wilson’s teammates got their paydays, #3 landed almost $22 million a season before the 2015 began.

He got that much because he turned out to be much better than the game manager Pete Carroll wanted and expected. He was a playmaker. A creator. A field magician. Patrick Mahomes before there was a Patrick Mahomes. He could do things on the field that nobody had ever seen before. Run for almost a thousand yards in 2014, set the franchise record for touchdown passes in 2015. A fine family man and exemplar off the field, he eventually won the Walter Payton Man of the Year award. Russell Wilson was the total package. He was everything you could ever want in a franchise quarterback.

Though he never said so - because why would he at the time? - but that was a problem for Pete Carroll. Because in his concept of offensive football, the quarterback is not supposed to be the star. He’s supposed to take care of the ball, not make mistakes, and hand the ball off to a bell-cow running back. That’s it. Not throw for forty or fifty times a game for fifty touchdowns and 5,000 yards in a season and win MVP awards and gain the level of clout that quarterbacks these days wield.

Was Pete going to get rid of Russell back then? Of course not. If for no other reason than that after bell-cow running back Thomas Rawls broke his ankle late in the 2015 campaign, the Seahawks running game disappeared for the next two seasons, and Russell Wilson became the entire offense. Literally - over 95% of the Seahawks offense in 2016 and 2017 came from either Russell’s arm or legs. In that latter year they had a single rushing touchdown, and that came off of a Wilson 21-yard touchdown scramble. If he had gotten hurt any time from 2015 through 2020, Seattle goes 6-10 in any of those season, at best. Which is what made it so gob-smacking when Pete admitted late last season (7-10 after Wilson got hurt and missed a month) that without Wilson, he’d have been fired years ago.

Perhaps the losing piper finally arriving to be paid finally beat some humility into the old man.

Back in those two runless seasons, his weekly lament in postgame presser after postgame presser was, “We have to get back to running the ball,” when that was simply impossible and you had one of the best quarterbacks in the game dealing every week out of both ability and necessity. It really made one wonder if he was watching the same games we were.

2018 arrives and Pete had his bell-cow running back again in Chris Carson. Accordingly, Wilson was largely relegated to the game manager role he had outgrown halfway through his rookie season, and Pete ran the ball into the ground and a needlessly quick one & done playoff exit. Thus was created the dynamic of that year and the one that followed, one of stifling Wilson’s playmaking in favor of stubbornly running the ball even after Carson started to break down physically and 2018 first round pick Rashad Penny became a total bust. The team was winning a lot of regular season games almost entirely off of Wilson’s late-game heroics, necessitated by the deficits run up by Pete’s ground & pound philosophy that lacked the personnel, particularly on the offensive line, to make it work and a defense that had been allowed to deteriorate. #3 could cover up all the team’s talent deficiencies in the regular season, but they always got quickly exploited come playoff time, and no deep playoff runs were ever in the offing.

Hence, the “Let Russ cook” cry from 12s going into 2020. Pete, to his credit, relented for a while, Wilson put up MVP-level numbers, and the ‘hawks started 5-0. But all it took was one bad stretch from Russ (the blowout losses to the Bills and Rams) for Carroll to yank back on the reins, which also coincided with opposing defenses adjusting to Wilson’s deep-throwing strengths and forcing him to throw short and intermediate range passes, which are his weakness. Something to which Pete and then offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer never adjusted, but for which only the latter paid with his job. The result was a home stretch swoon that only didn’t become a collapse because of the easy schedule, followed by another one and done playoff exit.

After the Super Bowl, this brewing “irreconcilable difference” that had up to that point been contained behind closed doors in VMAC finally overflowed into public view in Wilson’s interview on Dan Patrick’s radio show when he aired his frustrations at being the most sacked quarterback in the league since 2012 by a full 25% over any other starter throughout that time and expressed his desire to be more involved in personnel decisions, as currently befits a franchise quarterback making 30% of the team’s salary cap. Something that couldn’t not have infuriated Carroll, even though Wilson was entirely justified and had doubtless been airing these complaints privately for years only to be ignored every single time. Because, after all, in Pete Carroll’s view, quarterbacks are only supposed to be seen, not heard, and hand the ball off, not become superstars. That was followed by Wilson’s “camp” leaking four team to which he would consent to being traded, which set off a national sports media firestorm of speculation.

I never bought the idea that Wilson would be unloaded last season. If Pete wasn’t going to take three firsts and a ton else from the Bears for him, he wasn’t going to be traded at all. Perhaps he finally started to listen to Russ after all these years, and that was why he brought in Shane Waldron as OC at Russell’s request. Who knows?

But I also believed that if 2021 didn’t produce a deep playoff run, but instead another mediocre season and one-and-done playoff exist in which Wilson spent another year running for his life every week and being stifled in first halves only to be called upon to bail Pete out of his offensive ineptitude, there would be a reckoning the following offseason.

THIS offseason.

And we all know what happened - Wilson was a shadow of his former self and then got hurt for the first time in his career. No running back could stay healthy. Both the offensive and defensive lines were terrible. DK Metcalf was misused as a decoy. Trey Flowers was started at cornerback despite three previous years of terrible play and distorted the entire defense into ineptitude compensating for it. And I haven’t even mentioned the Jamal Adams trade that emptied Seattle’s draft capital cupboard and left the only option for replenishing it being….trading the only high-value asset the franchise had left: Russell Wilson.

All season long Seahawks Twitter was in denial, about the direction of the season, about whether to fire Pete Carroll for it, and about the growing likelihood of Wilson departing afterwards. Despite his dispensing his usual “go Hawks” platitudes, he never did commit to staying in Seattle - and why would he? Pete never said, even up until last week, that a trade of Wilson was in the offing - but he’s notorious for his politician-level ability to pump the air full of words while saying absolutely nothing, or just flat out shoveling BS with both hands.

And then the other day, bam - the worst thing that could have happened to the Seattle Seahawks happened: Pete Carroll stayed, and Russell Wilson was gone.

And now, Pete’s biggest headache - having to put up with a star quarterback getting in the way of his cherished “three yards and a cloud of misty field turf” offense - is gone.

Of course, he’s not going to pursue another franchise quarterback via trade or free agency, or even in the draft a year from now. Yes, he really is in love with Drew Lock.

Because what will Drew Lock do? Keep his mouth shut, not make mistakes, and hand the ball off to….probably a franchise-tagged Rashad Penny (which will be its own outrage), like he’s told.

Until enough 4-13 seasons finally convince Jody Allen to put Pete out to pasture.

Hopefully one will be sufficient. And then the REAL rebuild of this franchise can finally begin.