Pete Carroll says ‘we are going to win a bunch’ in first season

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Las Vegas Raiders head coach Pete Carroll has been pumped up about the start of training camp for a good bit.

The season is still a little over a month away, but this is the first opportunity Carroll gets to see his new team in action. After a year away from the game, the sabbatical did little to stop Carroll’s continuous enthusiasm. That has carried through the offseason program so far, as Raiders old and new have spoken positively about the differences this offseason has had to those prior for them.

One thing that has never changed about Carroll is his philosophy, and training camp is the perfect time to hammer that through.

Carroll has the utmost confidence in his group coming into the new season.

During his media availability at the start of training camp Tuesday, Carroll made it clear that this year’s Raiders team is a far cry from the four-win unit of 2024.

“We are going to win a bunch of games,” Carroll said. “I can’t even imagine anything else. I’ve been winning 10 games a year for 20 years or something. I mean, what are my expectations? We are going to win a bunch, and I don’t care who hears that.

“It ain’t about what anybody hears. It’s about what we do, and so that’s why expectations are really high. The standards need to be so that the expectations can be met. We’ll see what happens.”

Raiders fans are hoping for a repeat of Carroll’s tenure with the Seattle Seahawks, where the team had eight double-digit win seasons, two Super Bowl appearances and one Lombardi Trophy in the coach’s 11 seasons in the Pacific Northwest.

However, what is most interesting about Carroll as he begins his turn as Raiders head coach is not his well-documented success at the helm, but the lessons he has learned from his year away from the sidelines.

“The last year was really valuable to me,” Carroll said. “The perspective that you have when you’re in the middle of it is different than when you can step away. The opportunity for clarity … was so obvious to me, so I saw things differently, and I felt like I learned a lot of things and took in a lot and have altered my expectations of what we’re able to do and how we need to go about getting better and doing things more proficiently in all areas.”

Training camp is sure to reveal what the Raiders are going to look like when the season begins in September, so it will be exciting to see how it all unfolds.