Sunday a reminder of Carroll’s greatness

The Super Bowl is finally over: The media circus has subsided, the game has been played, snacks were devoured, Tim Tebow got a contract to talk about how he didn’t need a contract and, oh yeah, the Seahawks won. They didn’t just win: They made the game boring. At halftime it was 22-0 with an unbearable number of close-ups of Peyton Manning looking more uncomfortable than John Boehner during the State of the Union Address.

The mastermind behind the victory, of course, was none other than former USC head coach Pete Carroll. So when time expired, as a USC football fan above all things, I was a bit conflicted. Do I cheer? Am I happy for Pete Carroll?

To rub salt on my imaginary wound, in his post-Super Bowl press conference, Carroll likened the Seahawk’s 43-8 victory to the Trojans’ 55-19 swamping of the Oklahoma Sooners in the 2005 BCS National Championship game. It’s a strange sentiment coming from someone who, most Trojans believe, hightailed it out of Los Angeles in the face of NCAA sanctions.

The argument against Carroll is this: He left at an inopportune time. He didn’t embrace the Trojan spirit — he didn’t “Fight On.” As the saying goes, when the going got tough, Pete got going. It seemed that he left almost as quickly as he enamored himself to the USC faithful.

On the morning of National Signing Day, the impact of the sanctions from the Carroll era linger: The Trojans are in the last year of their scholarship reduction, and will once again roll out a thinner roster than their competitors. The finger-pointing involving NCAA sanctions could last forever, but here’s why we can’t blame Carroll: The coach of the Super Bowl-winning Seattle Seahawks was, more or less, the same coach who recruited players at the college level for USC.

But really, Pete Carroll did fight on — if you only consider his NFL career. He faltered in his first try at the helm of the New York Jets (6-10) and had a pair of playoff appearances but fell short of massive expectations in New England (27-21) before he was fired. In April of 2009, NFL Films named him one of the top 10 “Coaches Who Belonged in College” when weighing his NFL failures against his success at USC.

With last Sunday’s Super Bowl win, Carroll went from a coach who “belonged in college” to the hottest coach in American sports.

The Seahawks’ coach knows how to generate excitement — whether it’s bringing in Will Ferrell and Snoop Dogg on the sidelines at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, or Macklemore and Ryan Lewis to the Seahawk locker room. Above all things, Carroll is the consummate optimist. In an interview with former 49ers quarterback and ESPN analyst Steve Young, Carroll revealed his coaching philosophy that was developed in his years at USC.

“Really what we did at ’SC, we tried to take care of the whole person and love these guys up and figure out what they could possibly become and then help them get there,” Carroll said. “You’ve got to create a vision for that kid. You’ve got to get them to buy in and then you coach them with that thought in mind. You do that with every person in the program. You treat everybody with great respect in that regard … You don’t have to worry about the games. That’s not even part of our thinking. We’re just trying to do the best we can do, knowing when we do that, we’re really hard to beat.”

It’s impossible to hate Carroll as a person, and it’s tough to speak ill of his character when it’s amply evident that his positive attitude has led him to coaching success. Something about the culture in Carroll’s programs gives players a sense of calm in times of high duress, especially considering the Seahawks’ seemingly calculated dismantling of the Broncos in the Super Bowl.

The argument for the Trojans supporting Carroll’s newfound professional football success is this: He was a Trojan once. He brought a culture of positivity to the Trojan locker room, a sense of brotherhood in the football program that echoed with Ed Orgeron’s “One Team, One Heartbeat” mantra last season. And as the saying goes: Once a Trojan, always a Trojan. Pete Carroll is a Trojan, in every sense of the word. It’s time we give him credit for representing USC.

Euno Lee is a senior majoring in English literature. He is also the managing editor of the Daily Trojan. His column, “Euno What Time it is,” runs Wednesdays.