RENTON, Wash. — Pete Carroll’s an optimist by nature, especially at this time of year, when so much time is spent on the grass. So maybe his comment shouldn’t have caught me as off-guard as it did last weekend. But really the reason I found myself searching for a follow-up was out of deference for the Seahawks team he and John Schneider built a decade ago.
“This is the fastest team we’ve had,” Carroll said, talking, as usual, at a mile-a-minute pace. “We’re the fastest we’ve been. It shows on the field. You can see it in our pursuit; you can see it in special teams. The depth of competition is like it was two years before the Super Bowl—the of the competition. When we had guys that left our roster at the 53, they went all over the league. And with the guys here, I’d think it’ll be like that again.”
For the uninitiated, Carroll and Schneider, who arrived as coach and general manager a dozen years ago, have the construction of a historic defense, and Super Bowl champion, on their résumé.
They had the league’s best scoring defense four years in a row, all while their offense riding shotgun had athletes like Russell Wilson, Golden Tate, Percy Harvin, Jimmy Graham and Marshawn Lynch populating it. So the idea that this Seahawks team, the one coming off a 6–11 season, would be the fastest one that Carroll’s coached? It seemed far-fetched, maybe even absurd, to so much as insinuate.
But Carroll, to his credit, seemed to mean it. I tried to interject with how lightning fast I remembered the 2012, ’13, ’14 and ’15 teams being. He wasn’t having it.
“Yeah, that’s the way you remember it. We’re faster now,” he continued. “We’re running faster right now. That doesn’t mean we’ll play faster. Those guys played lightning fast. You remember the last time we went out with those guys against Denver, it was a ridiculously fast night of playing football. But this team can really run. The receivers can really go, the corners can go, the outside rushers can, the running backs are really fast. You can just tell.”
And the way Carroll explained the difference illustrates where his Seahawks are now, a month before his 13th season (that’s four more than he spent at USC) in Seattle begins.
Carroll fights the notion that this is a new start for everyone within the franchise. He thinks, probably correctly, that most people are simply making a judgment because Wilson isn’t with them anymore. But there is reality in the idea, too. The Seahawks are younger in key spots than they’ve been at any time since the Carroll-Schneider program’s early days. There’s competition everywhere. A promising young wave of prospects will be a big part of this year’s group.
So yeah, Wilson’s gone. Still, there’s plenty of intrigue as to where the Seahawks will go next as their coach approaches his 71st birthday in mid-September. We’ll explain in this week’s GamePlan, as I wrap up the first leg of my travel to NFL training camps.
