With Pete Carroll back in the NFL coaching the Las Vegas Raiders, some of his greatest stories with the Seattle Seahawks resurfaced. In an interview with Richard Sherman’s ‘The Volume’, the biggest play of both men’s careers was addressed.
The fallout of the Legion of Boom seemed to happen so fast. After back-to-back Super Bowl appearances in 2014 and 2015, the Seattle Seahawks band started to fall apart. Richard Sherman left in 2017, Kam Chancellor retired shortly afterwards, and in 2018, Earl Thomas III broke his leg and never featured for the Seahawks again.
In 2025, Carroll will be working with Tom Brady to bring the Raiders to life. It’s been ten years since that Seattle team was devastated by the fallout of Super Bowl XLIX, but Pete Carroll believes that if they’d won that game, they would have won three in a row.
Super Bowl despair ripped a dynasty apart in Seattle
In the 2013 season, the Seattle Seahawks dominated. They went 13-3 in the regular season and then dismantled Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl, 43-8. They were world champions, with one of the best defenses the NFL has ever seen.
Russell Wilson was set to be a superstar, while Marshawn Lynch wore teams down with his aggressive running style. The combination of an efficient offense and Seattle’s dominant defense was overwhelming, and in the 2014 season, they made it right back to the big game.
This time around, their Super Bowl opponent was Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, and it was much more of a fight. The game came down to the final moments with Seattle pushing the goal line for a game-winning score. But that’s when it happened. A rookie Malcolm Butler jumped a slant route and picked the ball off, ending the game and winning the Patriots the Super Bowl.
In Seattle, that single play unraveled the dynasty they were on the verge of building.
While sitting in his office in Seattle in August of 2023, Carroll reminisced with Richard Sherman.
“You guys were so mad at me”.
It was the first time Carroll and Sherman had sat together and talked about that moment for the world to see, and the Seahawks head coach explained his reasoning, citing the team wanted to make sure they got all four plays on the goal line. With one timeout, that meant they had to throw the football at least once. That was how they’d prepared, that was always the game plan, and they just needed to execute.
Everybody watching was stunned. Why not hand it to Marshawn Lynch? He was one of the best goal-line backs in NFL history. He’d managed 102 yards and a touchdown in the game already, and all they needed was barely a yard.
Ultimately, they fell short, but Carroll has a strong belief that crossing the goal line at the end of that game would have led to a dynasty.
Winning back-to-back-to-back Super Bowls
The conversation between the old coach and his player led to the ‘what if’. In a theory that seemingly originated with Doug Baldwin, Carroll said:
“Had we won that game, we’d have won the next one. We’d have won again. Because we got back anyway, we went back to the playoffs anyway.”
Carroll went on to explain that the team was so mad and so hurt to have lost that Super Bowl in such agonizing fashion that it bled into the following season. It was clear every day at the facility that they were hurting, and Richard Sherman reinforced that point.
The interview is excellent. Pete Carroll went on to say how proud he was of Richard Sherman, who battled his way through a lot of turmoil to have the career he had. They agreed on the philosophy in that Super Bowl and reminisced on the success of what was one of the all-time great football teams.
Pete Carroll’s return to the National Football League brings a legendary coach back to the game, with sights set on turning the Raiders franchise around.
