FILE - In this Oct. 31, 2009, file photo, Southern California head football coach Pete Carroll looks on during an NCAA college football game against Oregon in Eugene, Ore. The Seattle Seahawks fired head coach Jim Mora after just one season on Friday, Jan. 8, 2010. The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that Seahawks chief executive officer Tod Leiweke flew to California this week to interview USC coach Pete Carroll for the job. (AP Photo/Don Ryan, File) Original Filename: Seahawks_Mora_Football_NY175.jpg
Ryan/AP
Now that I’m back in front of the radiation-blasting double-monitor PFT hookup, I’m scanning back through recent e-mails in search of stuff about which you may be interested.
And, somehow, I found one that hasn’t already been covered by Rosenthal and/or MDS.
Seahawks coach Pete Carroll recently spoke with Chris Russo of Sirius Mad Dog Radio. The noteworthy portions of the discussion focused more on players not on Carroll’s new team than those whom he acquired over the recently-completed draft weekend.
Asked whether the Seahawks may have taken quarterback Jimmy Clausen if he’d still been on the board when Seattle used the 60th overall pick, Carroll said, “Sure, that’s real possible. Yeah, we liked him that much. We thought he was a good player and that he was going to be solid as a rock and it wasn’t going to be a big transition for him and all that kind of stuff.”
Carroll also gushed about a first-round quarterback on whom the Seahawks passed, not once but twice. “I think anybody that got Tim Tebow had a good draft because I think he’s going to surprise everybody,” Carroll said. “And I think he’s going to be a fantastic addition to a team. There’s another guy that we would have really liked to have been able to add for the future because of what he brings. He will not let these issues about throwing motions and things be in the way. He will will his way through that if he’s anything at all like I know.”
The Seahawks coach likewise heaped praise on former Minnesota Golden Gophers receiver Eric Decker. “Very, very good receiver,” Carroll said, “and we have a guy [previously] on that [Minnesota] staff, Jedd Fisch, who coached him and we knew all about him and really were hoping to get a chance to get him, too.”
Carroll possibly is using Jon Gruden’s patent-pending positivity approach, aimed at giving no one a reason to be upset with Seattle’s first-year coach. It’s also possible that Carroll genuinely covets each guy he mentioned, and that he wants each of them to know that, at some point in the future, Seattle could be an option.
Regardless of Carroll’s motivation, the possibility of planting a seed in a player’s mind regarding future possibilities requires Carroll to quit talking about players who are the property of other franchises. Though it’s not a blatant example of tampering, it’s the kind of talk that could (and perhaps should) anger the Panthers and/or Broncos.
If, for example, Clausen doesn’t play as a rookie and Matt Moore cements his hold on the starting job in Carolina, Carroll’s comments could make Clausen even less content in Charlotte, possibly prompting him to push for a trade to Seattle. Ditto for Decker, who now knows that Fisch and Carroll think highly of him in the event that the Broncos don’t give him the kind of reps and receptions that Decker thinks he deserves.
Our guess is that Carroll won’t receive a public knuckle-rapping for his comments, but we suspect that someone from the league office will be reminding him in clear terms that he needs to stop talking about how much he would have liked to have on his team players who are now legally bound to other NFL franchises.