Former Seahawks coach Pete Carroll finally embraces analytics with Raiders

Here's one to give long-time fans of the Seattle Seahawks a headache. When he took over as Seattle's new head coach back in 2010, Pete Carroll was rightfully considered a defensive guru, culture-builder and a premier evaluator of football talent. The hiring immediately paid huge dividends for Seattle, as Carroll put together the greatest three-year run any team has ever had in the NFL draft (with some help from general manager John Schneider).

That set up the Seahawks to be contenders for the next several seasons - and according DVOA they were the best team in the league four straight years (2012-2015). Given all the talent they had, only winning one Super Bowl was a bit of a letdown. We maintain had things gone differently at the one-yard line in Arizona the Seahawks could very well have pulled off a three-peat with another championship the following season.

There's no point relitigating the red zone slant from hell, though. However, there is new reason to be frustrated by how the Pete Carroll era ended. Sharp as his defenses were in the early years, once the Legion of Boom gradually fell apart, the quality of Carroll's D also declined. By the end, Seattle's once-vaunted defense had been below average at best for several years in a row. The latter part of the Carroll era was also defined by frustrating losses in should-have-won-it games - worst of all the infamous run-heavy playoff loss to the Dallas Cowboys.

The biggest problem? Aside from losing every piece of an all-time great defense, Carroll didn't change with the times. While he changed his scheme (or allowed his defensive coordinators to), he didn't change his fundamental philosophy - at its core a very old-fashioned, conservative approach to a rapidly-evolving game.

There are countless angles that go into "analytics," but if Carroll had only embraced one big element of it the Seahawks probably would have had a much better record in those close games - of which there were so many between 2016-2023.

We're talking of course about punting and kicking a lot of field goals on fourth and short, which in the end may have been the most-convincing reason for the team to move on. Our suspicion is that the late-2023 home loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers was the last straw for ownership. The outstanding fourth down problem was highlighted in a glaring way four separate times - twice when Carroll elected to punt on fourth and short - and twice when Mike Tomlin converted by calling quarterback sneaks, a play with a long-proven extremely high success rate.

Whether that was the deciding point or not, Tomlin still has his job and Caroll does not.

Carroll is back in the NFL though after just a year off. He's now the head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, who are technically owned by Mark Davis but seemingly run in large part by minority owner Tom Brady. The big culture change appears to be paying off for the Raiders in a lot of ways - and even Carroll is evolving.

According to Tashan Reed at The Athletic, Carroll has apparently become a believer in the ever-divisive analytics, which is a fancy way of saying math.

"There’s patterns to the game that I (began to see) differently,” Carroll said in February. “A lot of it was the analytic outlook of it... I’m really excited to convey those things that we take a look at differently than I have before,” Carroll said. “So, I have a really strong philosophy about how we do things and why we do what we do, but yet, if you’re competing, then you have to be dynamic enough to continue to grow and expand.”

This was the same energy that Carroll brought to the position in Seattle, but in practice he did very little to embrace analytics even when it had become an obvious unexploited advantage for several better-run teams around the league.

The eventual champion Philadelphia Eagles' super-aggressive fourth down approach to the 2017 season should have opened Carroll's eyes enough to make real, geniune and lasting changes to his own philosophy, but it never came. And so, the Seahawks continued to punt and punt and punt and kick and kick and squander countless opportunities to enact a forward-thinking and aggressive philosophy.

It's great that Carroll has finally seen the light - but there's no reason he couldn't have done this several years ago wth the Seahawks - and we'll never know what might have been as a result.