Pete Carroll appears to throw Seahawks management under the bus

In his final Pete Carroll Show ever on Seattle Sports 710 AM, Carroll gave a little bit of the details on the conversation he had with Seattle Seahawks management that ultimately ended with Carroll no longer being the head coach. Carroll's comments should be worrisome for 12s and for sports fans in general.

Most of us sports fans probably like to think the people running our favorite teams have an idea of about the sport in which they are involved. What we do not want is our favorite teams being run by accountants who only care about the bottom line and the team making money. This would be the team taking advantage of its fans as we are the ones who buy the tickets, TV packages, concessions sales, and jerseys that go toward the owner making money so that they can pay the players.

Under late owner Paul Allen, the Seattle Seahawks seemed to have a good dichotomy as the owner let the football people, especially general manager John Schneider and head coach Pete Carroll, run the on-field part of the organization. Allen may have been a sports fan but his business expertise was not in how to build a successful football team. He let Schneider and Carroll do that.

Pete Carroll said some scary words about the Seattle Seahawks

But based on what Pete Carroll said last week on his show, that may have changed with the Seahawks. During his conversation with Jody Allen leading up to his termination (and likely others but we do not know who else was in the room when the discussion took place) there appeared to be differing views on how to improve the Seahawks from the current trend of just being mediocre.

Carroll said, "And then, OK, what is the essence of the adjustments that are necessary? That's where maybe (Carroll and Seattle management and ownership) don't see eye to eye on, because I see it one way and I think I've got a way to fix it and I'm not going to kind of halfway fix it...I've got real precise and specific thoughts, and they may not see it that way, they may not agree with it, they may not see that that's the right answer or that's not the answer that makes them feel good.

"The difficult part is...it's really hard because they're not football people. They're not coaches, and so to get to the real details of it is really difficult for other people."

Carroll seems to make clear that the team wanted to make a change away from Carroll but the people making that decision are not the people involved in team-building. Thankfully, John Schneider is still involved with the team, but one might wonder if the purse strings will tighten a bit and this is Jody Allen and the Paul Allen Trust's goal.

The team has to be sold, per Paul Allen's wishes before he passed, eventually. That means the Trust is going to want the team to be in the most advantageous position to sell. If the team is not winning as much that is no big concern, but if the salary cap is busted then ownership would see that as a problem for the new ownership group to take on.

Or it could be that the eventual sell of the team has nothing to do with the firing of Pete Carroll. Now was also likely a good time for a change at head coach in Seattle because the team has been stuck in a years-long rut, but that decision needed to be made with forethought by people, like Schneider, who know how to win football games as that is what fans care about. Non-football people only care about the bottom line.

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