Pete Carroll revealed the madness behind the method of his last mandatory minicamp practice
Pete Carroll being the new head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders may be the best decision the franchise has made in some time. They have been in the depths of the bottom of the league for a while now, and hiring him could really change that. The former Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl winner and […]
Pete Carroll being the new head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders may be the best decision the franchise has made in some time. They have been in the depths of the bottom of the league for a while now, and hiring him could really change that.
The former Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl winner and USC Trojans National Championship winner knows how to rebuild a program and a franchise from the ground up. He's done it twice. And, just to make matters even better for the Raiders, the Super Bowl he did win was against the Denver Broncos.
This guy knows how to win, and the Raiders have tried to hire guys who know how to win, but it was always either guy who hadn't coached for a decade like Jon Gruden, never been successful as a head coach like Josh McDaniels, or just never been a head coach like Antonio Pierce. They finally went a different route.
So, in this offseason, you will see a different approach to things compared to what you have seen the last few years, and that even applies to how Carroll runs mandatory minicamps. On his last day of camp, he did something that you don't see a ton this early into the offseason, and if you did, then the reporters wouldn't have asked him the question.
Carroll did a lot of first team vs. second team, or third team vs. first team, or even second team — things like that. It's a bit different this early on.
"Today we really played game-like," Carroll told reporters after mandatory minicamp. "We started, there were 10 minutes left in the third quarter, and so we played all the way through to the end of the game, and somehow the commissioner got to come down to a tie, which was great. And then, because we wanted to go into OT, we went into OT and had a couple of exchanges in overtime as well.
"So, we just tried to log as many situations as we could throughout all of our time together. The last time we tried to go to we had a lightning thing that we had to get off the field on. So, I kind of overdid it, made like almost everybody got a couple of shots in OT, legitimately, as the clock worked and so worked out great."
To me, this helps some of the guys further down the depth chart get to see how they would stack up against the starters in the league, and that's really important when you're talking about reps. And for the starters, they get to go against different players than the same guys they go against every day, and that's also good for them.
When you go against the same guys every day, you kind of already know what will happen, and sometimes you can cheat the rep. And, in this case, Carroll wanted it to have a bit more of a game-like situation.
This is great by the Raiders, too. Carroll mentioned that he is still learning from his team. This only helps with that and puts every player in a different situation that they probably haven't been in yet. Carroll is once again doing things that show why he is so highly revered as a head coach.
‘There’s a million things’ – Raiders’ Pete Carroll used mandatory minicamp to learn the things he needed to learn about his new team
The Raiders are getting some things done that they need done.
