Pete Carroll is no stranger to building a winning football program – that is why Mark Davis hired him to be the next head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, after all. Through a near-unmatched combination of passion and dedication, Carroll has come to understand exactly what it takes to establish a winning culture as the head coach of a football club.
This stands true both at the collegiate and professional levels, where he’s won both a National Championship and Super Bowl as a head coach.
The secret to his success? It starts with the players; not him.
“The culture is the players, and you’ll see that,” Carroll said during his introductory press conference on Monday in regards to building a winning culture with the Raiders.
“It all starts with competition; either you’re competing or you’re not. And I’m going to make sure that’s really clear to these guys from the moment they get here.”
If there’s one thing I want them to understand, and I’ll start the message right now: If you want to be on a great team, you need to be a great teammate. And so, teaching what that’s all about and instilling that into the makeup of our program is crucial. The central term in the program is always going to be competition.”
In short, Carroll plans on hammering home the importance of being a great teammate, thus resulting in better competition and therefore leading to the team improving a whole.
That’s Carroll’s end goal: creating a better team all-around. Not necessarily trying to find a quarterback who can carry the load, but rather create a team so well-rounded that quarterback isn’t the end-all-be-all position the NFL-world frequently refers to it as.
Pete Carroll: Making the Las Vegas Raiders better as a whole
Quarterback being the most important position in football is the worst-kept secret to date. You’d be hard-pressed finding one single individual who believes anything different.
And yet, Carroll’s goal isn’t to get the Raiders a quarterback as much as it is to build a team that can support a quarterback.
“It’s our mission to build this football team up around the quarterback position; it isn’t the only spot,” Carroll noted on Monday.
“The quarterback position is one of the positions on the team, and we’ve got to make it all fit together well. We need to support our guy. We need to do what we can to make that work. It’s really about making a great football team around the quarterback position.
Coach Walsh taught me a long time ago that it’s the hardest position in professional sports to play, and so we need to make it as easy for them as possible. And we’ll go about doing that by running the football, protecting him, taking care of the ball, playing great defense and kicking the football when we want to kick it.”
Building up the Raiders as a whole will certainly be a challenge. Not because the team doesn’t have talent, but because of the many moving parts happening this offseason.
For instance, seven of the team’s 11 defensive starters are free agents. That’s every starter who isn’t named Jakorian Bennett, Jack Jones, Maxx Crosby or Christian Wilkins.
Luckily, Las Vegas comes equipped with the second-most cap space league-wide ($95.5 million). That will make Carroll’s mission a bit easier.
Possessing the sixth-overall pick in the upcoming draft only helps as well.
All eyes are on both Carroll and his general manager John Spyek as the pair begin constructing their dream roster from ground zero.
*Top Photo: ABC7 News
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