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Pete Carroll is going to change the culture of the Las Vegas Raiders.
He’s going to make them competitive.
He’s going to make it all about the football.
What does any of that mean? It sounds like gobbledygook. After all, culture is nebulous, everyone in the NFL is competitive or they wouldn’t be there, and of course the game is about the football. So how is Carroll, new coach of the Raiders, going to change the trajectory of a franchise that hasn’t won a playoff game in 22 years?
Let’s look at what he did when he took over in Seattle in 2010. First of all, the “he’s going to change the culture” stuff didn’t sit well with those Seahawks who were there during the Mike Holmgren days. Those teams had good cultures too, winning five division titles between 1999 and 2007, and reaching the Super Bowl.
Holmgren retired after the 2008 season, Jim Mora was coach for a year, then the Seahawks brought in Carroll, who despite the dark clouds that had gathered at USC was still hugely in demand.
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One of the first things he did with his new players is show them a film touching on the highlights of Seahawks history, from Steve Largent to Jim Zorn to the team that played Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl. (He’ll have plenty of footage of old Raiders highlights.) When the movie ended and the lights came up, he essentially told his players, “Hey, that’s great. We’re going to celebrate that history. But it’s over.” He took down the old pictures at the facility and started fresh.
That’s going to be sobering for the Raiders, who have so much reverence for their history. But this is a new era, and it has to be. With Tom Brady in ownership and Pete Carroll at the helm, this franchise is going to look different.
The message Carroll was sending: Honor the past, but for us to get where we’re going, it’s got to be about the future. We have a new way of thinking here. We have a new way of talking. We have a new way of doing everything.
Carroll explained to his players his path to this point and how it honed his philosophies. He talked about what he learned as coach of the New York Jets and New England Patriots, where he went a combined 33-31. He talked about the winning formula he developed at USC, how he embraced competitiveness at every turn.
“He did a great job of coming in and giving us his formula, his vision, his rules, what really mattered to him,” said Matt Hasselbeck, Seahawks quarterback at the time. “He brought enough guys with him that all spoke the same language. Even though we didn’t get a ton of one-on-one time with Pete, by the start of the season they could start a sentence and we could all finish the sentence. We knew what the right answer was.”
The deadwood was cleared off the roster. Nostalgia didn’t save anyone. If they embraced the program, carried the flag and helped the team, they would stay. Otherwise, there’s the door. There were definitely growing pains.
“I actually enjoyed it,” Hasselbeck said. “I wanted to hate it. I was turning 35 that year and here comes some college coach that’s having us do bag drills to start practice.”
There was an overhead sign on the way out to the practice field that read, “ALL IN.” Carroll positioned two strength coaches with clipboards and rosters, and they made note of which players jumped up to slap the sign with vigor, who barely tapped it, who ignored it.
“I thought it was great,” the quarterback said. “What I learned was the culture he was trying to instill was not that dissimilar to the culture we had. But it was much more clearly defined. And there was a clear emphasis on certain things.”
The phrase Carroll repeated was, “It’s all about the ball.”
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At an early team meeting, he called up a defensive player and asked, “Are we going to have the hardest-hitting, most physical defense in the entire league?”
“Yes, Coach,” the player said. That’s an easy one.
“No,” the quarterback remembers Carroll saying. “I don’t give a damn about that. That’s not the formula. It’s all about the ball. I want the ball back.”
The mindset was, I don’t care how hard you hit someone. A tackle is a tackle. A six-yard gain is a six-yard gain. I want that football.
Dan Quinn, now head coach of the Washington Commanders, was in charge of the Seahawks defensive line at the time. Every Thursday, he would show the team still shots of that week’s opposing quarterback, running backs, receivers. How did they hold the football? Was their elbow above their wrist when they were cradling the ball? Was the ball low? Was there a gap in the armpit area where you could punch the ball loose?
Carroll didn’t put stock in having the roughest, toughest defense. He wanted the football.
Whenever there was a scrum for the ball in practice, everyone — players and coaches — would chant, “Dogpile! Dogpile! Dogpile!” Whoever emerged from that with the ball was treated like a conquering hero. It didn’t matter if that player dived in without the ball. All the better.
“He just created this atmosphere where in everything we were doing — everything — it was all about competition,” Hasselbeck said. “Everything is a competition. Literally everything.”
That took some getting used to, as did the maniacal focus on stripping the ball and protecting the ball.
“The irony for me is that I really struggled with playing this version of, `Don’t turn the ball over. Don’t turn the ball over,’” Hasselbeck said. “It’s like when you’re in a golf match and someone says, `Hey, don’t leave it short.’ I wind up leaving it short.”
He said that early in the season he wound up playing like a teenager behind the wheel in driver’s ed. Tentative. Risk averse. And ultimately more prone to turnovers.
That’s the year the Seahawks won their division at 7-9. They were the first losing team to reach the postseason having played a full slate of games. They wound up beating New Orleans in the Beast Quake game, when the fan reaction to Marshawn Lynch’s touchdown run jiggled the seismology needles.
But it was in the lead-up to that game that Hasselbeck began to unclench. He had a conversation with position coach Jedd Fisch that went something like this:
“Hey, Matt, I saw you driving on the highway the other day, the 405. You’re an aggressive driver.”
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“I grew up in Boston. It’s actually the safest way to drive. Better to be aggressive.”
“Exactly. That’s how you need to play quarterback. Play it aggressive. It’s the safer way to do it.”
Time will tell if the Raiders are making the right move with Carroll. He has a track record for turning around the fortunes of franchises. He has the experience, and a clearly defined formula that he trusts.
Hasselbeck, for one, wanted to hate the system.
That didn’t happen.
“It was fun,” he said. “I enjoyed it. It was so refreshing. Let’s just compete. The best will be the best. Let’s go.”
