Seahawks: Four coaches worthy of replacing Pete Carroll
By Lee Vowell
The Seahawks have exceeded expectations in 2022 whether they stick at 7 wins or not. But it still might be time for Seattle to make a head coaching change. I certainly don’t want this to sound like an agist article. Pete Carroll is 71 years old but he has the energy of a 30-something.
But nearly every coaching regime, no matter how successful, gets stale over time. This definitely happened to Seattle post-2015 when many of the players who had made the Seahawks great in the early 2010s seemed to tire of Carroll’s style of coaching. Richard Sherman, Michael Bennett, and maybe even Russell Wilson went elsewhere (either by being released or basically forcing a trade) and seemed happy to leave.
Carroll has always been fantastic with very young players as his energy is contagious. Rookies Tariq Woolen, Ken Walker III, and Coby Bryant are learning and also having fun. If they had been drafted by the Patriots, for instance, would there be as much infectious joy from the coach to play football? No.
But then players get to be successful and the contracts get bigger and the happiness of simply playing the game gets overcome by the need to make generational wealth. This can affect the chemistry of a locker room. Is this a coach’s fault? Not so much. But a young team gets older and we have already seen one era of an aging Seahawks team begin to tune out Carroll.
Four coaches who could replace Pete Carroll for the Seahawks
The other issue is that for the past many years Carroll hasn’t seemed to have made smart hiring decisions defensively. And Carroll is a defensive coach so Seattle’s defensive side should always be decent. Instead, the defense has been bad. The Seahawks might just need a new direction for the team.
Carroll would still be Vice President of Football Operations and have a hand in how the roster is built and the team is run. He just won’t make the coaching decisions and won’t make the on-field decisions. And if the Seahawks are going to make a change, doing so this offseason before the high-end draft capital is used or a relative lot of cap space is consumed (two things that don’t happen to an NFL team often at the same time) might be the time to do it. Here are some coaches who are worthy of replacing Carroll.