The Las Vegas Raiders will go as Pete Carroll goes. If his history is anything to go by, the Raiders are trending up.
Sure, the franchise has had Super Bowl veterans lead the team before, like Josh McDaniels, but Carroll was the seed that sprouted the Seattle Seahawks Legion of Boom that helped get them to the Super Bowl twice in the 2010s.
As such, in his first opportunity to craft a team from scratch since, he deserves the benefit of the doubt, at least locally. That doesn’t appear to be the thought process at the national level, however, at least as indicated by one NFL analyst.
Writing for CBS Sports in a July 14 ranking of all 32 NFL head coaches, analyst Cody Benjamin placed Carroll just 17th, putting him in the bottom half of the league.
“On one hand, he’s 73 and six years removed from leading a playoff win. On the other, he’s a proven culture-builder and big-game veteran, guiding 10 postseason bids in 14 years atop the Seahawks,” he wrote. “There’s little doubt he’s set to raise the floor in Las Vegas, reunited with Geno Smith. The question is what, exactly, will constitute success in 2025 and beyond.”
In other words, Benjamin appears to be lukewarm on the head coach, even though he hasn’t had back-to-back losing seasons since 2010 and 2011.
The ranking could serve as the perfect motivator for the head coach as he heads into a new era. Perhaps even more motivating for Carroll, the analyst ranked several candidates over Carroll who have their own questions and lack the recent run of success like Carroll has enjoyed.
Pete Carroll Placed Behind Other Questionable Candidates
The ranking goes on to place coaches such as Mike Vrabel ahead at 16th and Kevin Stefanski at 13th. While Vrabel has reached a championship-level game more recently than Carroll, his overall body of work pales in comparison to the former Seahawks coach.
Carroll is 170-120-1 and has been the head coach in two Super Bowls. Vrabel is 54-45, and while the fit appears to be like a glove in his return to New England out of all of the options, his history is far from on a better level than Carroll’s.
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Kevin Stefanski has had to navigate a quarterback nightmare in Cleveland, which is worth cutting him some slack over, but to place him above Carroll as a more reliable coach is, respectfully, a stretch. Stefanski is 40-44 in his career, falling well short of Carroll.
To be fair to Vrabel and Stefanski, neither coach deserves to be placed on the short list of “bad” coaches in NFL history, (most coaches have had to fight their way to the top, making them “good” by definition) but placing Stefanski and Vrabel over Carroll should definitely serve as a source of motivation for the Raiders head coach.
Carroll won’t have to wait long to prove the ranking wrong as he faces Vrabel in Week 1 on Sept. 7. Carroll also faces Stefanski on Nov. 23, giving him the perfect opportunities this season.
Will the Raiders’ head coach make doubters think twice?