Carrolls secret sauce

[ZagHawk]

Imagine a team having their HC suspended for an in season cheating scandal and then having the national media and committee giving them the #1 ranking…
It’s like praising the Patriots and goating their coach even though everyone knows they cheated for years.

Pete’s approach and philosophy are proven winners, but even winners stumble. His shortcomings the last half of his run here in my opinion fall more on execution and injury more than system.

Every system or scheme whether simple or complex, innovative or traditional requires high level execution to be successful. Broncos had the greatest offensive ever seen and they got boat raced in the bowl, was that the coaches ineptitude or did the players fail to execute?

If Pete’s defensive philosophy is so outdated why does it seem so many teams have adopted the “limit explosive plays” mindset? It because the data points out that keeping the ball in front of you and limiting explosives correlates to winning.

But the bottom line is you have to have elite talent in a league full of elite talent to make any system work.

Pete's also had his teams playing real tight to the rules, if you listened to opposing fans during after their losses (it helps give outside perspective on a game) they would constantly complain how many holds were being done on the line and the backfield. Pete had his teams pressing the refs and the few times they would throw a flag, the overall effect was still worth it. That being said today's NFL keeps favoring the offense, more flags thrown on the Line and in the backfield. That's another intangible why Pete's defense looks a little less stellar.

 

[LTH]

its funny how we go from the sentiment almost being unanimous that we were 3 or 4 years away from really competing just last year in the preseason, to this year, calling for Pete's head because we might only get so far as the playoffs ... AGAIN. In year 2 of this iteration of the team.

I totally agree...

it's MY assertion that the Seahawks are better THIS YEAR than what people think.

I've rewatched the Eagles game and the Hawks O line was ok in the first half but they just got bogged down with drive killing peneltys. And it wasn't the rookies. They need to clean that up because it's killing them!
In second half of that game particularly in the in the 3rd Quarter, the O line was VERY GOOD run blocking against the best front 7 in the NFL against the run giving up 67.2 yards per game. (At least that's what Google said correct me if I'm wrong cause I'm not a stat guy.)

I really like the zone running scheme they are running...

When they pull Lewis to the right side, that is becoming a staple play. That gives Walker the option of hitting the a, b. or c gap and that plays right into his strengths as avslashvtype of running back... it's devistating when they execute it right and they are getting better at it as per the Eagles game... D I ssly and that tight end group are playing very well out of 12 and 13 personal which is really helping pass pro as well.

They are starting to gel and I only see good things ahead. once they get that run game going full steam they are going to be very hard to defend and Geno is going to have some big games.


LTH

 

[AROS]

This team is not as far away as some on here would lead you to believe. This is about a #13-15 ranked team in standings overall, about a #8 team in talent with potential with another great draft to be #5 or better.

Keep building up the trenches (mainly interior OL and more run stuffers and edgers), draft a potential QBOTF and there's no reason this team can't be competing for championships within the next few years.

 

[Spin Doctor]

This team is not as far away as some on here would lead you to believe. This is about a #13-15 ranked team in standings overall, about a #8 team in talent with potential with another great draft to be #5 or better.

Keep building up the trenches (mainly interior OL and more run stuffers and edgers), draft a potential QBOTF and there's no reason this team can't be competing for championships within the next few years.

I agree with you here. The team has under performed this year relative to their talent level. I think this roster has a lot of potential, especially on the offensive side of the ball. DK, JSN and Bobo are a good young receiver core going forward. Our TE's are good, but we need to let one of them walk, Disney(gotta love auto correct, I'm leaving it) is pricey relative to what he offers.

Our line isn't as bad as some believe. We need a viable center and another guard, BUUUT Bradford has shown potential. If these guys can stay healthy, I don't think this is a terrible line.

Our running backs are good, I think we really need to lean on Charbonett more. He's more consistent and he strikes me as the same type of back as Lynch. Walker is a good complementary back, but I don't think he should be our primary. He's the person we should call out after the opposing defense is tired. The knock out puncher.

QB is a big question mark, but we can still win games with Geno. I think that next years Seahawk, with the right offensive coordinator could be similar to this years Lions team, only a little better on defense with Geno.

On defense we have more questions. Signing Williams needs to be a must. Our D-Line is cobbled together at the moment, we need Williams to make things work. Nwosu and Boye should be a good combo on the edge.

I think our biggest question mark is the safety position and the linebacker corps. Wagner and Brooks could both be gone. That leaves us with Bush? Honestly Bush has seemed serviceable. I wouldn't mind rolling with him and Brooks if he comes at a good deal, along with rookie competition.

We're going to have weaknesses, but you don't need a perfect team to be competitive, I think this is what most people lose sight of.

Last but not least, we need some addition by subtraction. Waldron and Hurt need to go.

This team is on the right track from a personal prospective. If we're able to add a franchise QB on top of another LB, sign Williams, offload Diggs and Jamal Adams, maybe find a depth lineman we're going to be well on our way to doing things. Even without the franchise QB, we can roll with Geno for another year.

 

[LTH]

The thing that pure football fans don't get about this team is that it's been built of different stuff. Seattle possesses an entirely different chemistry in terms of its makeup and motivation than other teams. Where the rest of the league runs on benzene, we purr on diesel. Sure, the game is the same across the league, but what creates the combustion that makes things go is different in the PNW.

Ad much as I am often frustrated by Pete's sometimes too optimistic approach for it being idealistic, I also know that it's only seen as idealistic because it doesn't work for everyone. And therein lies the issue with appreciating it and evaluating it.other teams are constructed on easy to measure, football metrics. Pete's teams are measured somewhere outside of that, in the ether of what makes sport special to begin with. So for as angry as I sometimes am that we get beat in stupid ways, I also am reminded quite often that when the recipe works it is difficult to stop. It's just been a struggle to get the 'mix' right with this new group, between players and coaches.

I'm probably more turned on and tuned in to exactly what Pete is preaching because in my career, I've employed a lot of the same approach to team building and tapping into the strength of the human condition that Pete does.

There is literally science behind what he's doing. And it's not some fabricated, NCAA based, rah rah wishful thinking way of doing things. Folks like Peter Senge, a professor at MIT and author and thinker on strategies to harness the intangible strength in the human condition and between people in team settings.

An excerpt from wiki on Senge:

Throughout his career, Peter has been asking, “how do we create the conditions for people to work together at their best, cultivating the innate systems intelligence that is our birthright but is all but lost in modern culture?” As an engineer by training, his work has always emphasized tools and methods, not for their own sake but as vehicles for building individual and collective capacities.

I post this only because what this FO is often so misunderstood that it's difficult to evaluate and likely won't be appreciated in the grand scheme of things (across the NFL) for a long time. Sure. The results are what they are. But it's not as though there aren't but a handful of teams that rise above the ranks of the very good every year to be great. By that I mean that while we have underachieved to a degree, we also are better than most. I'm not satisfied with that, but I know that neither is anyone in the FO.

We can all ride KCs nuts for being as good as they've been. But how good were they before they got Patrick? And for Reid, I seem to remember him struggling through some lean years in Philly before he got Donovan.

The Packers? For all the creativity and dominance they once dished out, how good are they without Rodgers? How many titles have the won even with him since 2000?

I could go on.

We can lament our situation all we want. But it could very easily be worse. And only in very few circumstances could it have been much better. Unless we actually believe we should have won a championship, post LOB? Save for 2019 and 2020, I don't think this team was built for it after 2015. And if you consider that it took 4 years for Pete to cobble together a good enough roster to actual make a run after 4 years following 2015, that's not unimpressive. What makes it look bad that we didn't, is in part, a warped perspective on how the qb position over that period performed. #3 was both a blessing and a curse. There were other factors like the complete dessimatiom of our backfield that few teams could have overcome, but that somehow gets lost in the shuffle when evaluating how good this staff has actually been.

It's very easy to look back on Pete's tenure here and the moves that the FO was trying to make and see that

Ver 1.0 of the team took Pete 3 years to take from garbage dweller to champion and what should have been multiple championships. That lasted from 2010 to 2015.

Ver2.0, Pete reconstructed after the LOB dismantling and took from 2015 to 2019 to position for a real run. And, in 2019 and 2020 we failed in the end, but that failure falls far too much on the shoulders of Pete and some system failure as it does on the failure of an offense to function effectively... for the same reason the one in Denver now fails and has resulted in a team that is reliant on a strong defense to succeed (sound familiar?). And that doesnt forgive a defense that became far too leaky. But we didnt HAVE to be great in every facet of the game. We just had to be good enough and complimentary enough in all of them to succeed. And i think we should have been that.

Folks forget that in 2020, we had arguably one of the most talented rosters in the league. That's not me stating opinion. Tyler and Dickson were snubbed and we were still only behind the Ravens in ProBowl votes.

If you can bring yourself to accept these arcs of development, rather than seeing everything post LOB as some protracted experiment in failure (which requires looking at ME3 as something more of an obstacle than a savior - which btw, John Schneider saw him as in 2019) then moves like adding JA make a hell of a lot more sense. The team was primed to win in 2019 and 2020, and he was seen as the steel that would galvanize the defensive side of the ball enough to give us a shot. What happened after in the complete unraveling of Russ and the culture break that ensued needs to be viewed in the proper context. He was supposed to be the finishing piece for the old engine. When he was extended, that was STILL the mindset. Now? His place here makes less sense now.

And now, Pete has again, well within the 4 year span that he took initially and between 2015 and 2020, but on track with what he did between 2010 and 2013, positioned this team to be competitive. He in some ways is a victim of his own success, having extracted what he did from this group in year one of what is now year 2 of V3 of PCs Hawks.

It can look great at times. It can look bad at times. At times, it can seem disjointed and illogical. But in some ways, evaluating it all from the outside is akin to lifting the hood of a diesel powered car and expecting to see and measure the performance of gas powered components- agree that's probably not the best example. But if you dig into sport psych and additionally, the philosophy of the 'other Peter' Peter Senge and other contemporary experts on the human condition, it might make a bit more sense.

At the end of it all, seeing it all the way I do. As frustrated as it sometimes can be to watch this team go through its struggles, I have to just remind myself that sometimes the cause for what I'm seeing as failure might nit be what on the surface it appears to be. Because in the end, what's under that surface is just flat different than what we might expect.

He deserves the space to see this ver3.0, through.

EXCELLENT POST!

LTH

 

[LTH]

This team is not as far away as some on here would lead you to believe. This is about a #13-15 ranked team in standings overall, about a #8 team in talent with potential with another great draft to be #5 or better.

Keep building up the trenches (mainly interior OL and more run stuffers and edgers), draft a potential QBOTF and there's no reason this team can't be competing for championships within the next few years.

Ok... great post... but my question to you is, and it is an honest, respectfully inquiry, if that is how you feel then why did you join the fire Pete crowd?

LTH

 

[GemCity]

The thing that pure football fans don't get about this team is that it's been built of different stuff. Seattle possesses an entirely different chemistry in terms of its makeup and motivation than other teams. Where the rest of the league runs on benzene, we purr on diesel. Sure, the game is the same across the league, but what creates the combustion that makes things go is different in the PNW.

Ad much as I am often frustrated by Pete's sometimes too optimistic approach for it being idealistic, I also know that it's only seen as idealistic because it doesn't work for everyone. And therein lies the issue with appreciating it and evaluating it.other teams are constructed on easy to measure, football metrics. Pete's teams are measured somewhere outside of that, in the ether of what makes sport special to begin with. So for as angry as I sometimes am that we get beat in stupid ways, I also am reminded quite often that when the recipe works it is difficult to stop. It's just been a struggle to get the 'mix' right with this new group, between players and coaches.

I'm probably more turned on and tuned in to exactly what Pete is preaching because in my career, I've employed a lot of the same approach to team building and tapping into the strength of the human condition that Pete does.

There is literally science behind what he's doing. And it's not some fabricated, NCAA based, rah rah wishful thinking way of doing things. Folks like Peter Senge, a professor at MIT and author and thinker on strategies to harness the intangible strength in the human condition and between people in team settings.

An excerpt from wiki on Senge:

Throughout his career, Peter has been asking, “how do we create the conditions for people to work together at their best, cultivating the innate systems intelligence that is our birthright but is all but lost in modern culture?” As an engineer by training, his work has always emphasized tools and methods, not for their own sake but as vehicles for building individual and collective capacities.

I post this only because what this FO is often so misunderstood that it's difficult to evaluate and likely won't be appreciated in the grand scheme of things (across the NFL) for a long time. Sure. The results are what they are. But it's not as though there aren't but a handful of teams that rise above the ranks of the very good every year to be great. By that I mean that while we have underachieved to a degree, we also are better than most. I'm not satisfied with that, but I know that neither is anyone in the FO.

We can all ride KCs nuts for being as good as they've been. But how good were they before they got Patrick? And for Reid, I seem to remember him struggling through some lean years in Philly before he got Donovan.

The Packers? For all the creativity and dominance they once dished out, how good are they without Rodgers? How many titles have the won even with him since 2000?

I could go on.

We can lament our situation all we want. But it could very easily be worse. And only in very few circumstances could it have been much better. Unless we actually believe we should have won a championship, post LOB? Save for 2019 and 2020, I don't think this team was built for it after 2015. And if you consider that it took 4 years for Pete to cobble together a good enough roster to actual make a run after 4 years following 2015, that's not unimpressive. What makes it look bad that we didn't, is in part, a warped perspective on how the qb position over that period performed. #3 was both a blessing and a curse. There were other factors like the complete dessimatiom of our backfield that few teams could have overcome, but that somehow gets lost in the shuffle when evaluating how good this staff has actually been.

It's very easy to look back on Pete's tenure here and the moves that the FO was trying to make and see that

Ver 1.0 of the team took Pete 3 years to take from garbage dweller to champion and what should have been multiple championships. That lasted from 2010 to 2015.

Ver2.0, Pete reconstructed after the LOB dismantling and took from 2015 to 2019 to position for a real run. And, in 2019 and 2020 we failed in the end, but that failure falls far too much on the shoulders of Pete and some system failure as it does on the failure of an offense to function effectively... for the same reason the one in Denver now fails and has resulted in a team that is reliant on a strong defense to succeed (sound familiar?). And that doesnt forgive a defense that became far too leaky. But we didnt HAVE to be great in every facet of the game. We just had to be good enough and complimentary enough in all of them to succeed. And i think we should have been that.

Folks forget that in 2020, we had arguably one of the most talented rosters in the league. That's not me stating opinion. Tyler and Dickson were snubbed and we were still only behind the Ravens in ProBowl votes.

If you can bring yourself to accept these arcs of development, rather than seeing everything post LOB as some protracted experiment in failure (which requires looking at ME3 as something more of an obstacle than a savior - which btw, John Schneider saw him as in 2019) then moves like adding JA make a hell of a lot more sense. The team was primed to win in 2019 and 2020, and he was seen as the steel that would galvanize the defensive side of the ball enough to give us a shot. What happened after in the complete unraveling of Russ and the culture break that ensued needs to be viewed in the proper context. He was supposed to be the finishing piece for the old engine. When he was extended, that was STILL the mindset. Now? His place here makes less sense now.

And now, Pete has again, well within the 4 year span that he took initially and between 2015 and 2020, but on track with what he did between 2010 and 2013, positioned this team to be competitive. He in some ways is a victim of his own success, having extracted what he did from this group in year one of what is now year 2 of V3 of PCs Hawks.

It can look great at times. It can look bad at times. At times, it can seem disjointed and illogical. But in some ways, evaluating it all from the outside is akin to lifting the hood of a diesel powered car and expecting to see and measure the performance of gas powered components- agree that's probably not the best example. But if you dig into sport psych and additionally, the philosophy of the 'other Peter' Peter Senge and other contemporary experts on the human condition, it might make a bit more sense.

At the end of it all, seeing it all the way I do. As frustrated as it sometimes can be to watch this team go through its struggles, I have to just remind myself that sometimes the cause for what I'm seeing as failure might nit be what on the surface it appears to be. Because in the end, what's under that surface is just flat different than what we might expect.

He deserves the space to see this ver3.0, through.

I pray that was voice-to-text .

Guter Eintrag!

 

[AROS]

Ok... great post... but my question to you is, and it is an honest, respectfully inquiry, if that is how you feel then why did you join the fire Pete crowd?

LTH

Oh, I still think we need to move on from Pete. I'm purely talking the players. I agree with many that I think it's time. I really do.

 

[LTH]

Oh, I still think we need to move on from Pete. I'm purely talking the players. I agree with many that I think it's time. I really do.

Fair enough

LTH

 

[LTH]

Oh, I still think we need to move on from Pete. I'm purely talking the players. I agree with many that I think it's time. I really do.

My argument against this is that Pete's job is vast...but 65 TO 70% of his job is keeping this team motivated and keeping their heads in the right place.

How many coaches could keep their team motivated after that 4 game slide? NOT MANY IMO. Pete is so special in this area that from my perspective it trumps his negatives in which all coaches have negatives.

I can think of some coaches that are better than Pete but to think that the Hawks will find a coach that can be better than him is a huge gamble...

There is this premise that Pete medles in play calling both on the O and D, and although I think he contributes a lot to game plan. I don't believe their is enough proof to support that claim especially after KJ says that claim is wildly eggaggerated.

I do understand that 14 years of Pete is a lot and people are ready for change.. I just think when it happens that fans will gain a renewed appreciation of how special Pete is as when Pete leaves your not just losing a head coach... your rebuilding an organization. I really believe number one that, fans don't understand what that means.

number 2, there are going to be a number of down years at least 2 or three in a very best case senerio, until they replace what Carroll has built.

You think fans are upset now because of a four game slide and even missing the playoffs 2 or 3 times in 14 years? Just wait! This board is going to be calling for Jodi Allens head because they can't replace the success Pete has created... IMO it's going to be a complete Sh!t show around here.

But... on the flip side that's what I thought when Holmgren left... so I want to stay positive about it and I'm really trying to keep an open mind. I'm just very loyal and as that is one of my strengths it's also a weakness..

We will see what happens

EDIT. I Believe the only one than I have read on this board that understands fully what I am saying is Keasley45.... is post on this thread is sooooo spot on..


LTH