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Pete Carroll Wanted To Start His Own Football TV Network

The Boston Globe ran a profile of Seattle Seahawks (and ex-New England Patriots) coach Pete Carroll yesterday. It touched on the usual points for a Carroll article – what went wrong at his previous NFL stops, the ways he’s grown since, and the important role of a book by legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden in shaping Carroll’s recent success. (Note: sadly, the 99-year-old Wooden is reportedly in grave condition in Los Angeles. Carroll tweeted a tribute to Wooden earlier, one of many gestures of appreciation he’s shown toward the coach.)

But where perhaps the best tidbits can be found is an online extra in which profile author Albert Breer decided to “empty the notebook,” in his words. One bit of interesting honesty: Carroll said he was happy for his former players in New England when they started winning Super Bowls under his successor, Bill Belichick. It all sounded like token politeness, until Carroll added:

“Honestly, I gotta tell you, I was kinda fired up when they were 5-11 [in Belichick's first season] too. I didn’t want to see them turn it around that fast, and they didn’t. They struggled with the same team I was coaching. And they went into the second year, and they were struggling too until Tom (Brady) played.”

It’s refreshing honesty – Carroll doesn’t pretend he was happy with the way things played out for him in New England, and he seems to have an understanding of how demanding fans can be, and why he wasn’t exactly beloved with the Patriots:

“I loved that the fans were so into it…if we weren’t do[ing] well, well, they should be pissed, because I was. What’s the difference? I didn’t expect unconditional love in this deal and there wasn’t really a time where I felt bad about that.”

For someone whose philosophy is centered around grand concepts like “Win Forever,” that’s an awfully down-to-earth way of looking at things. But maybe his best revelation was:

We had some grandiose ideas of some things we wanted to do, me and [NFL analyst] Pat Kirwan, got into some stuff. We got close, but it didn’t quite work out. We wanted to create our own football network. It would’ve hit pretty big, but we couldn’t get it done. We had some pretty cool ideas.

Just one enthusiastic/mysterious statement like that one and he’s already gotten us curious as to what the Pete Carroll Football Network would have been like. So much so, in fact, that we’re going to go ahead and beg Carroll to look into this idea again whenever his Seahawks tenure is up. Make it happen, Pete. We’re expecting plenty of piano.