Everyone keeps looking at the Seahawks' problems with offensive production and sighing and saying, Wow, these offensive coordinators sure are bad. Yeah, okay. This ostensibly brilliant coach is clearly just incidentally hiring bad coordinators, backing them for years, and firing them only when the public pressure has become positively overwhelming (I was calling for Bevell's firing, and soon after Cable's, in like 2012, and they didn't get fired until last year). Of course none of the blame is on Pete. He's a brilliant, Super Bowl-winning coach. How could it be him?
It's all these weird little circular paths of logic that people keep following like fucking ducklings and never see their way out of. Pete is a brilliant coach so it can't be his fault so it must be the coordinator and somehow that doesn't lead back to Pete. Pete is a good coach because he won the Super Bowl because he's a good coach. Pete created the Seahawks because before he showed up we were bad and after he showed up we were good. I get that it's hard to see these things when you're inside of them. But exactly how many years does it take?
Okay, so here it is. Pete Carroll is a bad coach. The hard and ugly truth is that he's always been a bad coach. Ever since the very beginning he's had this old-school run-first philosophy about how offense should operate, and he has consistently, and with very little variation, run his offence in accordance with this philosophy. All the coaches he hires, all the coordinators and the O-line people and the QB people, all the playbooks and the playcalling, it's not some departure from his vision that he's too stupid or blind to notice. It's exactly the way he wants the offense to run, because he's too stupid or blind to see that that kind of offense just doesn't work anymore, because it's no longer 1993.
Seriously, if you pay attention you can see the direction the league is moving in very clearly. 1994 was a big leap, and then 2004 was another big leap, and since then there's been this consistent upward trend of increased passing efficiency and heavier emphasis put on the passing game by literally every team in the league but ours. This year we literally passed the ball less than every other team in the NFL. And people are still blaming the coordinator.
See, Pete Carroll took over the Seahawks at one of the lowest points in franchise history, and within a few years he'd led the team to a Super Bowl, which basically gave him full-blown hot-seat immortality (i.e. a job he'd never be fired from), because people assumed the reason we won the Super Bowl was because of his coaching. But it wasn't. It never has been. Our offense was every bit as bad then as it is now, at least coaching-wise: it was the same run-run-pass-punt, at least for the first half of every game we played. That's Pete's whole strategy, and it's the thing that's hamstrung the Seahawks, especially in these past few years as we've transitioned from -- how do I put this -- a team with a good defense to a team without a good defense.
But that's the point, right? That Carroll built this amazing defense from scratch and deserves the credit for it? Well, no. That didn't actually happen at all. Pete created an amazing defense from the absolutely incredible talent pool he had, and then when that talent ran out (quite literally, in Sherman's case), the defense became -- what's the word -- mediocre. Because Pete was never actually a good coach, of offense (obviously) OR of defense. Because what he really had was an insanely strong, insanely deep talent pool. Because the Seahawks had a few ridiculously loaded drafts early in Carroll's time with the team that became the cornerstone of our Super Bowl-winning teams.
Here's a quick list of players you might find interesting. Adam Timmerman, Shaun Alexander, Darrell Jackson, Steve Hutchinson, Marcus Trufant, Alex Smith, Frank Gore, Vernon Davis, Patrick Willis, Joe Staley, Michael Crabtree, Russell Okung, Earl Thomas, Golden Tate, Kam Chancellor, K.J. Wright, Richard Sherman, Byron Maxwell, Bobby Wagner, Russell Wilson, Bruce Irvin, Brandon Scherff. These are some of the more notable players drafted by the various teams for which Scot McCloughan was a primary talent scout between the years of 1994-2016. (I'm also leaving off most of the players he scouted for the Packers from '94-'99, with the exception of Timmerman, simply because I don't know which ones he was scouting.) McCloughan was with the Seahawks from 2010-2013 and he drafted basically our entire team. You ever notice how the drafts seemed to dry up right around when he left? The best players we've drafted in the five (!) years he's been gone are like Justin Britt, Tyler Lockett, and Frank Clark. I mean, those guys are great, but talk about a dropoff in talent. There's a reason why virtually every impactful Seahawk of the past decade joined the team during the period that McCloughan was our head scout (technically "Senior personnel executive," but I think we all know what that means). It's also the reason why the team was so successful despite, and not because of, Pete Carroll's coaching.
The team is nowhere near as talented now as it was then, mostly because McCloughan is gone and he's quite literally irreplaceable, but it's still good enough to win. But we can't win as long as Carroll and his absurd regressive ideas about how football ought to work is in control of the franchise. It's possible to win playing run-run-pass-punt, but only if your level of talent is so absurdly high that you literally can't lose (because you drafted basically six Hall of Fame-level players in three years, plus two other Pro Bowlers, and oh shit I haven't even mentioned Pro Bowler Doug Baldwin, undrafted in 2011, and Brandon Browner, also a Pro Bowler, undrafted in the same year). Once your talent level drops below that -- you know, like it is for >99% of all teams in history -- you have to actually have some coaching. And we don't. Hence why a team starting Russell Wilson, Doug Baldwin, Tyler Lockett, Jimmy Graham, Duane Brown, Justin Britt, Michael Bennett, Frank Clark, Sheldon Richardson, Bobby Wagner, K.J. Wright, Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor, and Earl Thomas missed the fucking playoffs.
I'm at the point where I actually kind of want the team to collapse so our players can go elsewhere and have successful careers. I mean, I'm a loyal fan and I'm never going to root for anyone but the Seahawks, but I'm so fucking disgusted at the way our front office and coaching staff is wasting the frankly absurd level of talent on the roster, and I desperately want to see what Russell Wilson can really do before he retires. But that's never going to happen under Pete. And if you still think it will, you haven't understood anything that's happened in the past seven years. This was peak Russell Wilson. This was the best he's ever played. And our coaching staff used him less than any other coaching staff used their quarterback in the entire fucking league. It's disgusting.
I've been sort of tentatively talking about hypothetically replacing Pete for a couple of years now, but at this point I'm outright calling for it. Obviously whatever hallucinatory fantasies Seahawks fans had about replacing Bevell and Cable with coaches who are magically competent (read: actually have functional gameplans that differ in every way from Pete's, and are allowed to institute them) were, in fact, hallucinatory fantasies. (This was actually pretty obvious as soon as he hired The Wrong Schottenheimer, but who's keeping track?) So, okay. Fire Pete. Bye now.
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