by Pete Carroll
We were playing the Patriots in New England and had just forced a fumble during the first quarter. Greg Robinson, one of our defensive coaches at the time, had the Beaver on a rope hanging from his belt, and in an excess of enthusiasm he threw it out there a little too far—and it landed right at the feet of a referee on national television! The poor official couldn’t figure out whether to throw a penalty or not, and the legend of the Beaver grew.
It was a little thing, but it helped keep us focused on what I had decided was important to our success. In this case it was turnovers, but it could have been anything. What mattered was that we did everything in our power to focus the players on our priority and have them buy into it without worrying whether it was silly or not. I think anyone who was on the team back then would tell you that it was more than just a fun distraction; it helped us play better football.
Even though we were developing an unconventional approach, I believed that these shared experiences built trust within our team, an essential part of being successful. I wanted the coaches and players to know that I had the utmost confidence in them, so they could work hard and enjoy the ride. This laid the foundation for what I thought I needed to succeed as a head coach.
After the annual NFL draft and our fall training camp, it was finally time for our first game of the season, and it was one to re member. The date was Sunday, September 4, 1994, and my first game as a head coach of the New York Jets was against the Buffalo Bills. The Bills were then coached by the great Marv Levy, and they had a roster full of Pro Bowl players, such as Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, Andre Reed, and Bruce Smith. They had been winning for years and had just appeared in four straight Super Bowls. Their organization set the bar in the league, and their “K-Gun” offense was as difficult to defend against as any offense I had ever seen.
We were in a rebuilding mode in New York, trying to put together something that would give us some substance and momentum. We beat the Bills that day 23-3. It was a huge victory and a great moment for us. After the game, I was on cloud nine. I was 1-0 as a head coach and confidant that we would have a winning season.
That night after the game, like I’ve done on many occasions, I went back into the stadium. When the crowds are gone, and the only people around are the guys sweeping up, there’s a special quiet in the air that speaks to me in a way that nothing else does. That’s exactly what I did on this occasion—I was hoping to hang on to such a great feeling just a little bit longer.
After a couple of minutes, I turned to walk back toward our team buses. I noticed for the first time all of Buffalo’s division championship banners on display—and it dawned on me that, while we had just won a great game, since Coach Levy had been there, they had put up winning season after winning season, division championship after division championship. There must have been six or seven of them up there. And as I stood there congratulating myself on my brand-new 1-0 record as an NFL head coach, it hit me: Now that’s success. Those guys had shown that they had what it took to continue to win year after year, in an almost permanent state of winning.
It would be years before the phrase “Win Forever” formed as a philosophy for me, but from that day forward, the image of those championship banners lined up one next to the other at Rich Stadium was fixed in my mind. During my time with the Jets, the San Francisco 49ers, and later the New England Patriots, I kept returning to that moment. It was something I knew was important, although at the time I couldn’t quite put it in its place.
After that first game, our season continued to be promising. Our team had come together and we started 6-5 in the difficult AFC East. In many ways the season at that point actually seemed to be shaping up better than our record showed.
Then came the Miami game. We were playing at home for first place in the division against the Dolphins and Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino in front of the largest home crowd to date, 75,606. We were up 24-21 with twenty-two seconds left and Miami had the ball at our eight-yard line. With the clock winding down, Marino yelled, “Clock, clock!” signaling that he was about to spike the ball and thus stop the clock. Instead, Marino faked the spike and threw a beautiful fade route to Mark Ingram for a touchdown. “The fake spike” is justifiably remembered as one of the all-time great bait-and-switch plays in NFL history. It was also a devastating loss for our team, and we were never able to recover our momentum. We went on to lose our next four games to finish a once promising season 6-10.
As tough as it was for us, what really worried me were the decisions we were going to have to make in the off-season. The new salary cap had just gone into effect, and to make matters worse, a few of the veteran leaders on our team were approaching the end of their careers, and it was not likely that we were going to keep them.
As we were working our way through it early in the off-season, and as I was dreading a few of those personnel decisions, I soon found out that it would not be my problem.
Late one afternoon in early January, I was summoned to Dick Steinberg’s office, a more or less daily occurrence in those days. Dick, the general manager at the time, had hired me for the head coaching job, and I knew he was as stressed out as I was about the future of our veterans and the direction of the organization. I also knew he believed there was a light at the end of the tunnel and trusted that we were on our way to getting there. I assumed this was another one of our many strategy sessions.
I walked across the hall into his office, and as I entered, Dick was sitting at his desk with his head down, avoiding eye contact with me. Right away, something didn’t feel right, but I still had no idea what was up. Then, looking around, I saw Leon Hess sitting all the way across the room from Dick in a single chair, with another chair in front of him. Gesturing toward the chair, Leon said, “Pete, come over here and sit down.”
I crossed the room and sat down, wondering what this was all about. True to form, Leon didn’t waste any time getting to the point. “In the business world,” he said, “a man in your situation would resign. But I know you’re not going to do that, so I’m going to have to let you go.”
I was caught completely off guard and couldn’t believe my ears.
A man in my situation?
Was he serious? I had been in the job for less than a year, and here I was being blindsided! I couldn’t think of how to respond, but it was clear that nothing I said would make any difference at this point. All I could see in Leon’s eyes was that he had made up his mind.
At first I was in total disbelief.
My very next thought was, This might be the best thing that ever happened to me. After all, I had a four-year contract with three more years left on it, and this guy was letting me go. Rebuilding a team with an owner who doesn’t see eye to eye with you is an uphill battle in the best of circumstances, and while I was looking forward to the challenge, there was no question that it would have been incredibly tough to pull off. Moments earlier I had been full of dread about what the next season would hold, and all of a sudden everything had changed. In any case, there wasn’t any point in arguing.
I didn’t say anything. I just walked out. Later I heard that he had made the decision to get rid of me after learning that Rich Kotite had been fired from the Philadelphia Eagles and would be available to step in. Personally, though, I think he had more or less made up his mind during that first team meeting, considering we never spoke one time during the entire season. In that first meeting, I think he came to the conclusion that I was somehow not right for the situation, or possibly not serious enough, to be the head coach his organization needed.
At the press conference when he announced the change, Leon Hess put on a big smile for the occasion. “I’m eighty years old,” he told the reporters. “I want results now, not five years from now.” Fair enough, but unfortunately for everyone involved, results were exactly what he got—dramatic results, just not the ones he wanted. The Jets went 4-28 for the next two seasons, after which Kotite was unceremoniously fired as well.
And where
was I during that press conference? After I walked out of Dick’s office, I rounded up my wife and kids, and within days we were on our way to Disney World, obviously seeking a drastic change of scenery.
Was Leon wrong to fire me? Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. It was his team, and he had the right to do whatever he wanted with it. A more interesting question is whether he made that decision because of what I was doing or because of how I was doing it. If I am being completely honest, I would have to say that it probably was a bit of both. I was new in the role of head coach and did not have my act completely together. That said, I still think that we were on the right track, and I wish I could have seen how it all would have played out, given more time.
In the long run, I have to admit that I probably contributed to my firing by the Jets because I didn’t do everything I could have done to make sure the owner understood my vision. Looking back, I didn’t understand the scope of my approach well enough to explain it to him in a convincing way. I mistakenly thought that having the team’s attention was enough. I still had some work to do when it came to defining and articulating my philosophy.
5
THE 49ERS WAY
In the ensuing weeks, I would take some comfort from still being under contract and having the breathing room to weigh my options. As other NFL jobs opened up, though, I quickly began to feel the urge to return to the field. After all, I had barely gotten a chance to get started at the Jets, and I was ready for more. I was still confident I was going to be a successful head coach if given the right opportunity. But realistically, I needed to set my sights on a defensive coordinator position.
Unfortunately, the window for coaching jobs in the NFL is small and closes almost as quickly as it opens. It is just the nature of the beast. You have to be ready to jump on something the moment it comes along, or more than likely you will miss your shot. As a professional coach, you are prepared for that. Where things get tricky is when several opportunities come up at once. As I was looking into which NFL coordinator jobs were about to open, I received a telephone call from Mike Shanahan, the new head coach at the Denver Broncos. They were preparing to hire a defensive coordinator, and he wanted me to come out to Denver to interview for the position. Mike wanted to build a whole new defensive staff. Despite a 7-9 record that year—thanks in large part to great performances by quarterback John Elway—they had probably been the worst team in the league defensively. This made the coordinator job a very exciting prospect.
In a lot of ways it would be a solid situation for me. Given the Broncos’ previous performance, it seemed clear that there would be virtually no expectations of me in the short term and yet a huge potential upside if the defense could be built to complement Elway and the offense. I could have a strong hand in the rebuilding, and it was hard to see how anything would not be an improvement over what had come before. Besides, I had already gotten myself into a rebuilding frame of mind before I had unexpectedly been let go from the Jets.
This seemed to be exactly what I needed after leaving New York. Mike was an excellent coach, and he was coming from San Francisco, where he had been the offensive coordinator under George Seifert, whom I respected and admired enormously. I knew he would be bringing with him a style and mentality that I understood and respected. As I hung up the phone after agreeing to fly out the next day, the only question in my mind was whether or not I’d be offered the job.
The next day as I was getting ready to leave for the airport, the phone rang again. On the line this time was Coach Seifert. The 49ers had just won the Super Bowl 49-26 over the San Diego Chargers, and George was on his way down to Los Angeles to tape The Tonight Show. He had a bombshell to drop on me. The news hadn’t been made public yet, but Ray Rhodes, George’s defensive coordinator, had been offered the head job with the Philadelphia Eagles and was going to take it. And so, with my suitcase literally packed for Denver, George had called to ask if I would be interested in coming out there to talk about replacing Ray—and he wanted me to come that day. As exciting as it sounded, and though San Francisco was my hometown, I felt that I had made at least some degree of commitment to talk to Mike first. My initial response was to explain the situation to George and say, “Sorry, I’m gonna go to Denver and do the right thing.”
Besides, I told myself after I had put down the phone, Denver was clearly the smart move for me. An hour earlier it hadn’t even been a question. Yet now something deep inside me suddenly didn’t feel quite right. The fact that Mike was coming from George’s 49ers was one of the selling points for Denver, and here I was turning down George himself without even so much as an interview. Halfway to the airport, I had the taxicab pull over at a pay phone on the side of the Long Island Expressway where I called George back. We agreed that I would go to Denver first and then come see him the next day.
I ended up being offered both jobs, which forced me to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
In one regard, the Denver job would be somewhat easier because expectations were lower, and it was a great opportunity to advance my career and reputation. Going to San Francisco meant following a Super Bowl season that would leave me facing incredibly high expectations and also stepping into the shoes of a high-profile defensive coordinator in Ray Rhodes. Deep down, some part of me had to know that my heart was really in San Francisco, but on a pragmatic level I really just didn’t feel that I could take it.
After meeting with George, I spent most of that night alone in my San Francisco hotel room, on the phone with my wife, Glena, trying to think it through. Finally she asked me the question I hadn’t been able to ask myself: “Are you afraid the expectations are too high in San Francisco?”
And all of a sudden it clicked. What she was asking me was, Were the expectations too big for me at the 49ers? Was I really not prepared to compete on that stage? As soon as I came to terms with what my hesitation was actually all about, I called George and told him I would take the job if he still wanted me. Fortunately, he said yes.
Going to San Francisco turned out to be absolutely the right decision. As a kid growing up in the Bay Area, I had always been a huge 49ers fan, and their style and success were ones I always admired. As a graduate assistant and young college coach, I would return with my family to Marin County in the summers to visit my parents. Whenever I got the chance I would visit Coach Seifert, who was coaching the Niners’ defensive backs at the time. George would let me sit in his office and ask questions about the NFL, the philosophy of former 49ers head coach Bill Walsh, and overall defense. It was in his office that I became familiar with professional football and the business behind the sport. When I had a chance to interview with NFL teams, I was fortunate to have had that behind-the-scenes experience. Without those sessions hanging out with George, I would in many ways have been starting from scratch when I moved from college coaching to NFL coaching. Thus, I was thrilled to have the chance to go back home and coordinate his defense.
The 49ers had been the team I had rooted for as a kid, and I was honored to coach for them and George. Being a defensive coach himself, he easily could have micromanaged me, but instead he allowed me to call the defense and have an ownership of our scheme. Along with that, we would often discuss how he managed his team and his staff in more general ways, as I was constantly thinking about how I would lead a team when given the chance again. I wanted to take every opportunity I could to learn from his recent success.
Coach Walsh was another great source of guidance and insight during this period. When I came aboard, the 49ers were coming off a Super Bowl victory and everything in the organization was clicking. Before my second season, Coach Walsh was hired as a consultant. I couldn’t have been more excited because in addition to being one of the coaches I most admired, he also was one of the guests whom Professor Albaugh had brought into class when I was a graduate student at UOP, and just beginning to formulate my coaching style.
During my time with the Niners, I would often bounce between the staff room and Coach Bill
McPherson’s office, learning about the culture of the organization. Coach Mac coached linebackers and was a quiet legend during the years when the 49ers were a dominant team in the NFL. He was one of my closest friends on the staff. Coach Mac would always give me the viewpoint of an assistant coach experiencing the systems under Walsh and Seifert. He loved both coaches as leaders of the Niners, and he was able to describe and differentiate their unique and subtle nuances. He helped me to understand the essence of the Niners’ culture.
It was very interesting to see how the assistants reacted when Coach Walsh entered the facility or a staff meeting. They had such a sense of respect for him and he was held in such high regard that they were nervous and on edge around him. Because of his intimidating presence, he was typically left alone for most of the day. Since I had not been there when he was leading the organization, I didn’t feel that sense of protocol—and he certainly didn’t insist on it. I was quite comfortable around him and stopped by whenever I could. In his office we would spend hours chatting and I would ask him a variety of questions about how he changed the culture of the Niners, including the details of his philosophy. For me, it was an incredible experience, as he was able to explain to me the spectrum of his approach, ranging from personnel decisions to coaching decisions and more.
We talked a lot about the quarterback position. Coach Walsh was one of the great quarterback gurus in the history of the game, and he convinced me that everything a coach does in designing his offense should be about making it easy for the quarterback, because his job is so difficult. He believed that everything should be structured with the quarterback in mind. We talked a lot about the discipline that was necessary to do this when designing game plans, structuring practices, and calling plays.
