In a matter of hours, Pete Carroll will begin preparations for his fourth head coaching stint in the NFL, after a one-year hiatus from the profession. Carroll reached agreement with the Las Vegas Raiders on Friday morning, becoming just the third coach in NFL history to command four different franchises alongside Marty Schottenheimer and Bill Parcells. If you’ve been keeping up with our coaching carousel predictions, this move should not come as a surprise, especially after Ben Johnson agreed to become the next head coach of the Chicago Bears.
In recent weeks, Carroll was firmly cemented as the Raiders’ Plan B in the event that a pursuit of Johnson went awry or never lifted off the ground.
However, now that the hiring of Carroll has been finalized, we do have a series of eyebrow-raising trends that have converged to underline what I still believe to be the definitive surprise of the cycle.
Barring an absolutely stunning change of direction from the Dallas Cowboys, Bill Belichick is going to start spring practice as the head football coach at the University of North Carolina. And, thanks to Carroll, none of the excuses we’ve heard about teams eschewing Belichick have managed to withstand the hiring cycle.
See if you can follow me here:
• There was a fear that Belichick, at 72, was too old. Carroll, however, will turn 74 at the start of the 2025 season, making him the oldest Week 1 head coach in NFL history (a distinction previously held by Romeo Crennel). In this cycle, we’ve seen Steve Spagnuolo (65) and Todd Monken (soon to be 59) also receive serious and well-deserved consideration. Mike McCarthy (who will turn 62 during the 2025 season) remains a very serious candidate for the New Orleans Saints’ job and was likely a serious candidate for the Bears had Johnson gone elsewhere. Aaron Glenn, will turn 53 before the start of his first Jets training camp, which, while not old, would have made Glenn one of the older coaches hired in last year’s cycle (Jim Harbaugh, at 61, being the oldest).
• There was a concern about Belichick and defensive-minded head coaches in general. Now, with Carroll, we have a majority of the coaches hired so far this cycle (Mike Vrabel, Aaron Glenn, Carroll) who would be considered defensive head coaches. Last year, defensive coaches outnumbered offensive coaches five to three in the cycle as well.
• There was a question about money, power and time. Belichick, via some industry palaver, was said to have turned off prospective teams because of the way he ran an insular kind of monarchy in New England. Since that moment, the Patriots hired Vrabel, who, while a different person, had amassed a great deal of power in Tennessee before he and the Titans went their separate ways. Liam Coen essentially got a general manager in Trent Baalke unseated in the middle of the hiring process in Jacksonville. The Raiders also dismissed general manager Tom Telesco after Telesco, in his only season in the team’s top personnel role, selected one of the most productive rookies—Brock Bowers—in NFL history. This was seen at the time as a move to make the job look more suitable for Johnson, who had preferred the potential for alignment with a general manager. And, indeed, the hiring of incoming Raiders GM John Spytek was seen as a possible turnoff for Johnson that helped push him further into the arms of the Bears. While none of these positions create a Belichickian monarchy per se, there is absolutely zero doubt that Vrabel, Johnson and Coen are infinitely more powerful than anyone else in the building aside from the owner coming into the 2025 regular season.
If there was an aversion to paying Belichick at the top of the market, we’ve not seen that reticence to spend from the Bears, Patriots and Jaguars. All of these teams blew past industry-standard rates to secure the head coaches they wanted. If there was a gray area about the length of a Belichick contract, the Raiders seemed to have no problem striking an agreement on an unorthodox three-plus-one deal, with a fourth year serving as a team option. Industry standard for coaches is now between five and six seasons, which was bolstered from a previous age where four-plus-one contracts were fairly standard.
While we can’t know where any of this leads, we do know that there were a lot of teams desperate for quality coaching this offseason. The Patriots fired Belichick’s owner-picked successor after just one year, torpedoing a promising young coaching career, just to get the position back on track. The Jaguars rode the absolute razor’s edge of gentlemanly behavior in fear of losing Coen and probably still earned them a lifetime side-eye from their neighboring franchise in Florida.
And, somewhere, one of the greatest head coaches in NFL history, who absolutely wanted one of these jobs at the outset of the 2024 season, is pounding the recruiting trail at Bergen Catholic High School. The hiring of Carroll kind of rounds out the nonsensical nature of it all, unless of course there is something about Belichick’s oeuvre that we don’t fully understand. Either way, he’ll have to utilize his own stage to prove the seven hiring teams this cycle right, or dreadfully wrong, in forcing him to stay there.
