page_title: Pete Carroll
section_title: Tenure
hierarchical_section_title: Pete Carroll / Career / USC Trojans (2000–2009) / Tenure
caption_attribution_description: English: Head Coach Pete Carroll leads his University of Southern California Trojans football team through the pre-game "Trojan Walk" through numerous fans during the 2008 season.
context_page_description: Peter Clay Carroll is an American football coach who is the head coach and executive vice president of the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League. He is also the founder of Compete to Create, a high performance training company headquartered in Seattle. He is a former head coach of the New York Jets, New England Patriots, and the USC Trojans of the University of Southern California. Carroll is one of only three football coaches who have won both a Super Bowl and a college football national championship. One of Carroll's greatest accomplishments was masterminding the Seahawks' defense known as the Legion of Boom who led the NFL in scoring defense four years straight, becoming the first team to do so since the 1950s Cleveland Browns.
context_section_description: The criticism of Carroll became louder when Carroll's first USC team opened the 2001 season going 2–5, with some sportswriters writing off the once-dominant Trojans, who were the only Pac-10 football team to never finish in the national top 10 during the previous decade, as a dying program. However, after the slow start, Carroll's teams proceeded to go 67–7 over the next 74 games, winning two national championships and playing for another.
  Carroll was considered one of the most effective recruiters in college football, having brought in multiple top-ranked recruiting classes; he was also known for getting commitments from nationally prominent players early in high school. His son, Brennan Carroll, was USC's recruiting coordinator as well as the tight ends coach during the elder Carroll's tenure as head coach. He had consistently been on the forefront of recruiting due to his ability to connect with potential players on their level, including becoming the first college coach with a Facebook page, as well as an early adopter of Twitter.
  Carroll's team won a then-school record 34 straight games from 2003 to 2005, a streak that started after a triple-overtime loss to California and ended with the national championship game against the Texas Longhorns in the 2006 Rose Bowl. Fourteen of those games were later vacated for breaking NCAA rules. During his tenure, USC broke its average home attendance record four times in a row (they play at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum); the USC home attendance average in 2001, his first season, was 57,744; by 2006, it was over 91,000. During this period, USC had a 35-game winning streak at the Coliseum, spanning 6 years (2001-2007). The streak began on October 13, 2001, with a 48-17 win over the  Arizona State Sun Devils and the final victory  was a 47-14 win over the Washington State Cougars on September 22, 2007. The streak ended on October 6, 2007, with a 24–23 loss to the Stanford Cardinal who was a 41-point underdog. Prior to this the last loss was on September 29, 2001, (during Carroll's first year) to Stanford Cardinal 21-16. The success of USC football under Carroll led to a sharp rise in overall athletic department revenue, growing from $38.6 million in Carroll's first season at USC to more than $76 million in 2007–08.
  Controversy arose when USC was excluded from the National Championship Game for the 2003 season, even though ranked #1 in both the Associated Press (AP) Poll and the ESPN/USA Today Coaches Poll. Years later, (2008) he was asked if winning the Rose Bowl was ever not enough. "No. You've got to understand that our mindset is to focus only on what we can control. We can only control getting to the Rose Bowl. Winning our conference and going to the Rose Bowl is what our goal is every year. Our goal isn't about national championships, because we don't have control of that -- that's in somebody else's hands. We found that out years ago [2003], when we were No. 1 but then we were No. 3. We already knew that but that just proved it. If we win our games and we're out there and they want us to go somewhere else, then we'll go. We love the Rose Bowl." 
  Carroll was repeatedly approached regarding vacant head coach positions in the NFL beginning in 2002. Carroll hesitated to return to the NFL after his previous experiences, and said that his return would likely rest on control over personnel matters at a level unprecedented in the league. He had insisted over the years that he was happy at USC and that money was not an issue; he also was said to enjoy the Southern California lifestyle. When asked if he would retire at USC, Carroll responded:
  I am prepared to do that. That's the way I look at it, like this is the last job I'm ever going to have. I approach it that way. Now, whether it is or not, I don't know. Someone asked me the other day, 'Does that mean you're never going to leave?' Why do people want to make you say that? I have no idea, but I can't imagine doing anything else. It's a great place to be. I've been so lucky and fortunate. I owe so much to the school and the peopl
caption: Carroll leads his team through the "Trojan Walk", a tradition he created at USC in 2001.
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