Pete Carroll may not have been the Raiders first choice as head coach, but he has one of the greatest coaching resumes in football history and was easily the most qualified candidate among this year’s list of head-coaching candidates.
Carroll has long been one of the most recognizable coaching personalities in the league and after 14 seasons in Seattle, no one knows him better than those who covered him with the Seahawks.
The Athletic’s Michael-Shawn Dugar was one of those covering Carroll in Seattle and he shared a couple of interesting insights last month about Carroll’s coaching methods and his affinity for Geno Smith.
“Pete knows Geno and probably believes in Geno more than anyone outside of Geno’s immediate family. The way Pete talks about Geno is the way I talk about my daughter. Pete really loves this dude,” Dugar said on the Just Win podcast.
“At some point last year, he was like, ‘Geno is one of my favorite stories. He’s one of my favorite players I’ve ever coached.’ Pete has been coaching since the 70s. For Geno to rank that high, that means a lot. I think if anything, it doesn’t stop him from drafting a quarterback, but it may tip the scale in Geno’s favor more than like making it a full-on open competition…”
In the time since Carroll was hired by the Raiders, we’ve heard a lot about his emphasis on competition – most recently from one of the top quarterback prospects in this year’s draft class.
“Coach Carroll was awesome,” former Texas QB Quinn Ewers said on the Rich Eisen Show last week. “He’s always talking about ‘Compete, compete, compete.’ I think he probably says that word a hundred times a day.”
Dugar shared that the 73-year-old Carroll has a unique system to measure the competitors on his roster against each other.
According to Dugar, Carroll and his coaching staff will grade every player in the building on the way they compete.
“One of the things that Pete had in Seattle, which I’m sure he still has in Las Vegas, was a competitor scale. He ranked every player, the coaches did, one through seven,” Dugar said.
“He didn’t reveal what players ranked where, but the seven was the highest [and] was like the ultimate competitor. I think he’s only given out two of those. The six [grade] is right under that. You’re the ultimate competitor, as well. The difference between six and seven was, you’re the ultimate competitor at seven and you bring guys with you.”
Maxx Crosby is a virtual lock to get the highest grade on Carroll’s competitive scale, but is there anyone else on the roster capable of pulling off that mark?
Jakobi Meyers? Adam Butler, maybe?
x: @raidersbeat