Among Seahawks coach Pete Carroll’s tasks following Sunday’s 27-13 win over the Giants was to make a quick call to one of his most significant mentors, former Minnesota Vikings coach Bud Grant.
With the victory, Carroll tied Grant for 18th in NFL history in coaching wins with 168 including playoffs.
And while Carroll often downplays such individual accolades, this one was meaningful because of what Grant means to him.
The early years of Carroll’s coaching career were like most for those trying to make it in a tough, cutthroat profession — seven different jobs at six different colleges or NFL teams in 11 years of trying desperately to find a foothold somewhere.
When he was fired as defensive backs coach of the Buffalo Bills along with the rest the staff of head coach Kay Stephenson following a 2-14 record in 1984 — Carroll’s first year in the NFL — the then 33-year-old Carroll had no idea what the future held.
After an agonizing wait for what was next, the phone rang seemingly out of the blue with a call from Grant asking if he’d be interested in being Minnesota’s defensive backs coach.
“Bud found me,” Carroll once said of Grant, who had returned to take over the Vikings that year after one season in retirement. “I don’t know how he did it.”
That led to a five-year stint with the Vikings in which Carroll developed one of the best secondaries in the NFL, a tenure that finally got his career off the ground.
“I’ve been in the League One year, I got fired, got thrown out of it and he gave him a chance to come back,” Carroll said Sunday. “I don’t know why he saw it but he did.”
So when the Seahawks got the win Sunday, Carroll wanted to take a minute to reflect on the milestone with Grant, now 95 years old.
“I did get him on the phone and talk to him here just to kick it around because I just had to try to make it real,” Carroll said. “I can’t tell you how much I love the guy and how much I’ve respected him throughout my career and the opportunity that he gave me to get me back in the league.”
Then Carroll went and did something the famously taciturn Grant would never have done — appearing to take an early victory lap during his postgame news conference for a season that is barely halfway through.
Carroll seemed especially ebullient after Seattle’s third in a row, a victory that kept the Seahawks in first place in the NFC West. It’s been a season in which they have continued to defy the many skeptics who figured this would be a lost year in the wake of a 7-10 record in 2021 and the offseason trade of Russell Wilson and release of Bobby Wagner.
“I hate that we were crappy early in the year and we weren’t doing stuff right, but we held on to it and we knew — we felt like we knew where we could go, and we’re getting going,” Carroll said. “You know, all the people that doubt, like you’re losing — we run the ball too much, you don’t understand football and he can’t stay up with the new game and all that kind of stuff, that’s a bunch of crap, I’m telling you. Look, we’re doing fine.”
But if such remarks wouldn’t have been the Grant way, he wouldn’t have disapproved.
Carroll has often said one of the biggest lessons he learned from Grant was that a coach has to be true to himself. As Carroll has recounted often, he felt he didn’t necessarily live up to that during his first two NFL head coaching stops with the Jets in 1994 and the Patriots from 1997-99, the latter in which he followed the famously hard-wired Bill Parcells.
After being fired from New England and taking a year off, Carroll said he decided to fully heed Grant’s words.
“That’s what I came out of my time with him,” Carroll once said. “It’s a greater sense of confidence that I could get this done if I could do what was really important to me.”
And as Carroll has often said, he “hasn’t looked back since.”
Carroll got the USC job in 2000 and led the Trojans on a 10-year run of dominance that rivals any in Pac-12 history.
That led to the Seahawks’ job in 2010 — Carroll enticed in part by the challenge of showing that he could indeed make it as a head coach in the NFL — and leading Seattle to its first Super Bowl title four years later and most sustained run of success in franchise history.
And while there remains a lot of work ahead for the 2022 Seahawks — and for Carroll to show he can build another consistent winner — being now forever linked with Grant in NFL annals seemed to make the now 71-year-old Carroll more reflective than ever Sunday.
“This is really special,” he said of Seattle’s surprising season to date. “This is a very special opportunity right now. It’s been because of all of the hype and the circumstances and all that and the challenge of it and the doubting and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I like this challenge. I like this whole thing. I’ve liked it from the start. (People thought) we wouldn’t be here. But the fact the guys are coming through, it’s because of the way they’ve worked and how they’re bringing themselves to work every day and how much they care about it. It just makes it like it’s a coach’s thrill. It really is. That’s all we can hope for.”