Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll has accepted the blame for calling a pass play on the one-yard line in the final seconds of Super Bowl XLIX—rather than handing the ball off to Marshawn Lynch.
The dust has settled, but Carroll said he’s still thinking about what could have been, in an interview with Matt Lauer which aired on Thursday’s edition of NBC’s Today.
“Let me tell you this one,” he said. “These don’t go away. These occurrences, they don’t leave. These occurrences have stayed with me over the years in a manner that they fuel me, you know. The one USC National Championship opportunity with 19 seconds on 4th and 7—those don’t go away. I don’t want to lose those. I don’t want to wash them out and ignore them. I just want them to be in the place that they will help me be right.”
Lauer, of course, asked Carroll about the team’s decision to throw a slant to Ricardo Lockette on the one-yard line in the final seconds of the Super Bowl. He made sure to mention that numerous analysts have been saying it was the worst play call ever. Carroll didn’t see it that way, although he acknowledged that the result was bad.
“It was the worst result of a call ever,” he said. “The call would have been a great one if we’d caught it. It would have been just fine and nobody would have thought twice about it.
“We knew we were going to throw the ball one time in the sequence somewhere, and so we did. And it just didn’t turn out right.”
Carroll also said he went back and explained the play call to the team during a meeting earlier in the week. And even though no players or coaches spoke out about it during that time, he still thinks some guys are having trouble coming to grips with it.
“I don’t think at this point that everybody’s on the same page about that sequence necessarily, but that’s OK,” he said.
It’s a long offseason, and Carroll and the Seahawks will have plenty of time to lick their wounds and regroup. They are currently listed as the favorite to win Super Bowl 50 (13/2 odds).
[If interested, you can watch the entire interview here.]