The University of Southern California football program hasn’t been the same since coach Pete Carroll left, in part because of NCAA violations that occurred while coach Pete Carroll was there. Now that the position is vacant once again, coach Pete Carroll has been linked to it.
Dan Patrick said Monday that Carroll is on the short list for the job. Informed about the situation by reporters on Monday at the end of a fairly long press conference dissecting his team’s latest fourth-quarter collapse, Carroll said this: “I love USC. It’s a great place. Flattered? I appreciate it Dan, but that’s not happening. We’re in good shape here.”
The comment comes at a time when the Seahawks aren’t in good shape.
“I haven’t really been in this kind of situation with a really good team,” Carroll said regarding Seattle’s 2-4 record. “It felt so much different, and the results are flipping in terms of some of the factors and stuff. This is new in that regard.”
At some point, the question will be whether the Seahawks even are a “really good team.” Although the loss to Carolina happened on a touchdown pass from quarterback Cam Newton to tight end Greg Olsen that worked in part because of a mistake in communicating the coverage from the sideline to the players, Carroll pointed out that things hadn’t exactly gone swimmingly on the final drive before the final play.
“Our communication now is really at a high level, and unfortunately you can make a mistake, and we did,” Carroll said. “We let them down there before that all happened. They already were in field goal range and all that. We hadn’t done the right things earlier, but that was a big mistake.”
With each “big mistake” that mars a regular-season game for the Seahawks in 2015, it’s hard not to wonder whether everything that’s going wrong for the Seahawks traces to the “big mistake” in choosing pass over run in February.
Regardless, the Seahawks are staring at a de facto elimination game on Thursday night in Santa Clara. Somehow last year, they were able to parlay a 3-3 start into the No. 1 seed in the playoffs. This year, with the No. 1 seed (and possibly the No. 2 seed) already squandered to Green Bay, Carolina, or Atlanta, picking up a fifth loss before Halloween with two games to play against Arizona and trips to Minnesota and Baltimore on the docket, the window for winning the NFC West or getting a wild-card berth will narrow considerably.