It's a Coach Rivalry!
It'd be better if it was players, I guess
Happy Friday. You made it. Well done you.
There’s nothing like a good rivalry in sports, and maybe this is nothing like a good rivalry in sports. (Old joke.) But we’ve suddenly got Pete Carroll and Jim Harbaugh back in the same football division, facing each other twice a season.
It’s not everything! But it’s not a total washout. We’ll take it.
Carroll is just getting announced by the Las Vegas Raiders as their next head coach today, Friday. Harbaugh, of course, ditched the University of Michigan for the Los Angeles Chargers last year after leading the Wolverines to a national championship and into a bunch of unsavory NCAA violation stuff.
(Pete Carroll also famously blew out about a million NCAA rules during his time at USC, before he ran away to the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and left the Trojans to nearly disintegrate. It’s a thing.)
Carroll is 73 years old. Harbaugh is 61 with health issues. So I guess we won’t be fashioning this as a street brawl. On the other hand, these two have been awesome rivals, and you take your sports hate where you can find it.
Standard disclaimer: Sports hate is not the same as hate-hate. In sports, we’re pretty much free to say we “hate” somebody or some team, when all we really mean is we’d love to see them obliterated all the way down to their subatomic particles and, if possible, wiped not only off the Earth but also from our personal memories, like in “Inception” or “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
Anyway — Harbaugh and Carroll hate each other, sportsly speaking. They hated each other in college, when Harbaugh’s Stanford team faced USC on the regular, and again in the NFC West, when the Seahawks and Harbaugh’s 49ers met way too often with way too much on the line during a couple of amazingly intense seasons.
They hate each other’s coaching styles. On top of that, each of them appears to find the other smug, superior and preening. (They’re both right.)
Commence hostilities. Harbaugh and Carroll had the well-remembered “What’s your deal?” handshake after a college game in 2009, and various cross-accusations of cheating, dirty plays and the like ensued on a reliable basis in the years that followed. It was great theater.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s way better to have the athletes themselves, not their coaches, going at it. The Seahawks’ Richard Sherman was a famous shite-disturber during the best years of the Seattle-San Francisco bloodletting, and those games remain some of the hardest-hitting football I’ve ever witnessed in person. Just two teams raging on one another, continuously.
Of course, those teams were a reflection of the respective coaches behind them. Can the Carroll-Harbaugh history now somehow breathe life back into an ancient AFC West rivalry? We can only hope. Sports hate is inherently a good thing.
Cale Gundy was on local talk radio less than an hour ago extolling the virtues of Pete Carroll.
Money observation: "They hate each other’s coaching styles. On top of that, each of them appears to find the other smug, superior and preening. (They’re both right.)"