HENDERSON, Nev. – A common theme among the Raiders’ early 2025 opponents, preseason included, is that coach Pete Carroll has a storied history with many of them. Perhaps that isn’t too surprising, as Carroll is a football Forrest Gump of sorts, but it’s hard to ignore the obvious storylines that have arisen with each of his early tasks as the Commander-in-Chief of Raider Nation.
It started with Vegas’ preseason opener, which was the obvious ripping of the band-aid that was his return to Seattle after what was essentially a forced retirement in early 2024. The year-by-year format of the NFL schedule didn’t allow for Carroll’s return to occur during the regular season, but the fact that his very first game action with the Raiders took place in a stadium he all but put on the map was a connection that couldn’t be ignored.
The Raiders’ second preseason game came against the 49ers, who were Carroll’s biggest divisional rival during his stint in Seattle. As a Bay Area kid, Carroll grew up in a 49ers family himself, though he claims he always loved both teams in the area in his youth.
The lasting memory for most fans with Carroll’s Seahawks and the Niners, however, were his stand-offs with then-coach Jim Harbaugh and, of course, the infamous Richard Sherman-Michael Crabtree rant.
The preseason finale requires a bit more digging to find the connection, but Sherman did that job for us in a past podcast episode with his former coach. That game saw the Raiders travel to State Farm Stadium in Tempe, a place that has typically been a house of horrors for his teams, for a date with the Cardinals.
“It’s where the ‘Legion of Boom’ died,” Sherman said. “Arizona’s stadium is a house of horrors. (That’s where) we lost the Super Bowl. (That’s where) I tore my Achilles, that was my last game as a Seahawk. Kam (Chancellor) hurt his neck, that was his last game as a Seahawk. Earl (Thomas) broke his leg.”
The flood of memories nearly made the old ball coach emotional, to the point where he asked Sherman to cut that part of the conversation short.
“Can we not talk about this?” Carroll replied. “It’s the only topic I don’t want to expound upon it. You may want to cut this out.”
This brings us to the regular-season opener in New England on Sunday, another game where the connections are so obvious it almost feels redundant to repeat them again in print. Of course, there was the aforementioned Super Bowl 49 goal-line disaster that stands as the lowest moment in Carroll’s coaching career.
But Carroll also spent a relatively successful three-year stint in New England that saw the team make two playoff appearances before he was canned in favor of Bill Belichick in what Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft called “one of the most difficult decisions he’s ever made”.
When a reporter asked Carroll if playing New England still means something, given that lengthy history, Carroll’s response was simple and honest.
The theme of personal history won’t disappear when the Los Angeles Chargers come to town for the Raiders’ Week 2 home opener on Monday Night Football. Carroll’s old friend Harbaugh is the man in charge of that operation nowadays, and I don’t think it would be too shocking to see a testy interaction between the two after a passionate matchup. After all, the Raiders and Chargers did get into a pretty large fracas during their Week 1 clash last season.