Well, this is going to go over poorly in a certain portion of the country.
Pete Carroll did a radio interview discussing Seattle’s win at New England, and he was asked his thoughts on the atmosphere at Gillette Stadium. Carroll was fired as head coach of the Patriots before the stadium opened, and the Seahawks hadn’t visited Foxborough under his tenure, so it was Carroll’s first game coaching in New England for the opposition.
He was a bit underwhelmed by the home crowd’s passion:
Seahawks coach Pete Carroll was asked Monday to describe the environment at Gillette Stadium during Seattle’s 31-24 victory over the New England Patriots.
It appears that he came away unimpressed.
“OK,” Carroll said during the “Brock and Salk” show on 710 ESPN Seattle. “It’s not a great place. They weren’t nuts. It’s because they’re so used to winning. There was a time when they kicked their last field goal to go ahead, and it was like a round of applause for the nice effort. Gosh, our guys would be going berserk. We’re so hungry for it. It’s a gorgeous setting, beautiful arena and the fans, just the whole thing. It’s really classy.”
Carroll hedged a bit at the end there, and it’s not like anything he’s saying is that bad, in a vacuum. Carroll coaches a team in a stadium engineered to maximize crowd noise, after all. Nothing is going to seem loud by comparison.
But Carroll knows his target. He has firsthand experience dealing with Boston fans. If there’s one particular segment of sports fandom that will lose their minds when someone calls into question their team loyalties, it’s Boston fans.
The win had to feel great for Carroll, as some of his worst moments as an NFL coach have come at the hands of the Patriots, from his original firing all the way through the Super Bowl defeat in 2015. (Just run the ball!) It’s hard to blame him for throwing a few light jabs.
We’ll have to wait and see if Boston fans take the bait on this one.
[ESPN]
