Pete Carroll finally stopped coaching football at USC a few years back to coach in the NFL–where players are actually allowed to get paid and Carroll doesn’t have to look the other way. It was a good move, too–Carroll’s Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl last year. When you win the Super Bowl a certain segment of the population thinks you can do anything. (Especially if you’ve already won national championships at the college level.) So people ask things like, say Pete, how would you run this restaurant better? Or excuse me, Mr. Carroll, do you think I should major in art or finance? The Seattle Times‘ Jerry Brewer found out what Pete Carroll would have done differently in Iraq.
For a football coach he’d take a surprisingly peaceful, non-confrontational approach to the problems. He would have sent a force of 10,000 or so just to walk around and ask Iraqis how we could help, “as opposed to bombing (expletive) thousands of people with shock and awe.” Carroll’s teams always have been, come to think of it, about efficiency. “Give me a thousand peace workers that would go over and do that. Just listen and talk. Think of what we could’ve done, as opposed to killing hundreds of thousands of people or whatever we did.” That’s Pete Carroll, football coach, with a very un-Rumsfeld approach to conflict.
