INDIANAPOLIS — As the final few passengers boarded a direct flight from Seattle to Indianapolis on Monday a buzz began to emerge.
Walking down the aisle — past a number of Seahawks coaches and personnel who had boarded for the annual trip for the NFL scouting combine — came Pete Carroll.
In years past, Carroll would have been in first class with the rest of the Seahawks contingent that included coach Mike Macdonald and general manager and president of football operations John Schneider.
This year, Carroll was back in coach — albeit, in an exit row with an empty seat beside him.
It was a trip Carroll didn’t know he would make until Jan. 24, when he was hired as the coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. He was flying out of Seattle because he still has a home in the city, one he said he intends to keep.
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A little into the flight, Carroll headed up into first class and spent considerable time standing in the aisle talking to Schneider, Macdonald and others.
After a while, the plane hit some turbulence and the call was made for all passengers to return to their seats and put on their seat belts.
Carroll momentarily lingered.
“The plane’s bouncing all over the place and the pilot’s like, ‘please take your seat,’” Schneider recalled Tuesday with a smile. “Rules for thee and not for me. But yeah, we had fun.”
Tuesday, Carroll handled another responsibility of his new job, meeting with reporters for a 15-minute session from a podium. He was assigned the same podium as Schneider, who spoke an hour before.
Carroll ended up talking for almost 25 minutes, at one point telling a Raiders official who was trying to end it that he’d take a few more questions and wrap it up.
He spotted some reporters he remembered from his Seattle days, playfully asking if they had any questions, assuring they all got in a few.
Clearly, he was relishing being back on the NFL stage after a season of uncertainty following his removal as coach of the Seahawks following the 2023 season.
He indicated in some of the few interviews he did during his year away that he wasn’t sure if he’d return to coaching and that he’d be OK if he didn’t. He accepted a job leading a course in the business school at USC that began in January.
Tuesday, he made clear that was Carroll doing what he does best — putting a positive spin on things.
His goal, he said, was always to return to coaching — even at the age of 73, which will make him the oldest coach in NFL history when the 2025 season begins.
“If you remember, I didn’t retire,” he said. “I did that purposely. I wasn’t ready to stop coaching. We had a nice agreement up there (with the Seahawks) as we turned this thing around. I was really excited for John Schneider to get his chance to do what he gets to do. In my mind, I was always competing for what was coming up.
“Maybe the actions I took, because you didn’t see me very visibly, I was not making a point to do that. I really wanted to take to the opportunity of being around my family and all of that.”
Carroll noted he attended as many games and activities as he could of his kids and grandkids. That included hanging around the football program at the University of Washington, where son Brennan served as the offensive coordinator (Brennan has since been hired as the Raiders’ run-game coordinator and offensive-line coach).
It was Carroll’s first fall away from football since 2000, when he took a year off after being fired by the Patriots and before becoming head coach at USC in 2001.
“This was a really unique season for me, obviously,” he said. “It wound up being full of grandkids and games. I saw more football games this year than you can imagine. All the high-school games, JV, varsity, UW games and then of course everybody that’s playing all over the league and watching all those games.
“So, it was really a fun offseason, in a sense, that kind of just extended. But it was really rewarding, too, because you have an opportunity to look at a whole different vantage point. And in that, I saw things differently than I’ve seen them in a long time. So, I’m hoping to take advantage of that.”
Carroll said he felt he grew as a coach during his year away.
“There’s patterns to the game that I saw differently,” he said. “There’s patterns to down-and-distance situations, whether you’re playing JV football or you’re playing for the Super Bowl. You can see that occur in games more clearly. Really, a lot of it was the analytic outlook of it. But it was kind of like … things kind of slowed down a little bit watching it this time around.
“When you’re in the midst of all of these seasons and every week you’re just so frantically going about planning for the next game you don’t get the chance to have that perspective and slow your mind down and really take a clear visual look at it.”
Throughout his news conference Tuesday, he expressed no bitterness about the ending of his time with the Seahawks, who he led to the only Super Bowl title in franchise history while creating a résumé that may be hard for any other coach to match.
He noted that he still keeps in touch with many former Seahawks players saying, “You might be surprised how much we all communicate. All the guys from back in the day, we still communicate and watch each other and share stories and the whole thing.’’
And he said interactions he had with fans and others during his season off made it clearer to him the lasting legacy his Seahawks’ teams created.
“They were great years,” he said. “It’s still home to me. I never would have known, had I not been hanging around the area this year, how much of a connection we have made with the community and the people. The fans and the people that I’ve met running through the airports and in the streets, wherever we’re going, have been so gracious. And it’s had such an obvious effect on me of how we did relate through the time we were together. And I’m really grateful for that. I’m really grateful for that. I didn’t have the idea that there was that much of an exchange.
“Like I said, even in coming here to the Raiders, my job isn’t just the team. It extends beyond that. It extends to our fans. It extends to the people that support us and fill our stadium up and make it hard to play because we’re filling every seat and all of that. They’re helping us win.
“So we’re all in this thing together. And taking that effort to Seattle, we were rewarded so extraordinarily because of the 12s and the way that they love their teams. So it was an unforgettable relationship. And I’m never going to lose connection with them. I just don’t want to. So I’m going to do everything I can to stay connected as much as possible.’’
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