Pete Carroll's comments about what went wrong this season are incredibly worrying

Pete Carroll has been the head coach for the Seattle Seahawks for 14 seasons and that will likely continue for at least another year or two. Carroll is also Vice President of Football Operations so Seahawks chairperson Jody Allen cannot simply terminate Carroll as a coach if she wanted to, and he would be removed as part of the organization. Carroll's roots with the team go much further than just him being head coach.

But with anyone who has worked a job for 14 years and who has been in charge for that entire time, sometimes one needs to be able to view the overall situation as if they were new. That takes talent and means a person can change and adapt as needed, potentially even completely changing some ways of doing things. But one might wonder if Pete Carroll has that talent.

He has overall been the Seahawks' most successful coach ever. He has more wins than any other head coach in franchise history (137). the best winning percentage (.606), and more playoff victories (10). He also led the franchise to its only Super Bowl victory which happened at the end of the 2013 season. But Seattle has now missed the playoffs in two of the last three years, so can Carroll lead the team to success in the future?

Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll might not know what's wrong

I have my doubts after some of what Carroll said in his season-end show on Seattle Sports 710 AM on Monday. Carroll was asked if he thought the team was closer to being a Super Bowl team now than he did a year ago and Carroll quickly answered, "Yeah. It's so clear. We've improved." Seattle's record and many statistics would argue against him. The record is the same as last year as was the number of yards per play the team allowed defensively.

Seattle also gave up the same amount of points per game (23.6) as they did in 2022. Offensively, though, the team scored two fewer points per game than they did last season. This is even though the Seahawks supposedly added talent along the offensive line with center Evan Brown and at wide receiver with Jaxon Smith-Njigba.

But the most worrisome of what Carroll had to say was what the issue with the Seahawks was this year and it was the obvious: Run defense. Instead, Carroll said the problem with the defense was that the team was "young," and that "we played young," and that the team made mistakes because of youth. This seems to be clearly incorrect. And if Carroll truly believes this, he seems to be overlooking simple facts. Plus, saying youth is the problem and that that is easily fixed will fail to address the tackling issues and alignment problems.

Seattle's starters along the defensive line were Jarran Reed, Leonard Williams, Mario Edwards, and Dre'Mont Jones. None of those players are "young." Edwards is 29, Reed is 31, Williams is 29, and Jones is 27. Bobby Wagner, who is normally excellent against the run, is 33. Starting safeties were Jamal Adams (28) and Quandre Diggs (30) are not young either.

Carroll also seemed to be at a loss for words in what happened to the run defense as the year wore on or how to fix that issue. Either Carroll is clearly misleading 12s on what he thinks is wrong or he doesn't really know. If the latter is true, the Seahawks need to find a new head coach.

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