Seahawks' Carroll finds a new life in Seattle

“That's always kind of been my mode when something like that occurs,” Carroll said. “So we packed up and went south.”

It's funny now that he has rebuilt his coaching career, first with unprecedented success at USC and now in a return to the NFL with the Seahawks. It's a moment that is quintessentially Carroll, capturing his resiliency. But back then, there was no guarantee he would resurface after the Patriots fired him, the second time in five years he had been dismissed as an NFL head coach. It wasn't a vacation that brought him back, but months of introspection and a wholesale overhaul of his coaching approach.

On Sunday, he will face his former employer for the first time, but if you think there's a desire for revenge swirling somewhere in there, then you're missing the point. Carroll's comeback to the NFL wasn't about showing anyone they were wrong about him as much as it was about demonstrating how he had changed.

It's a mindset, more than anything else, according to Carroll. An approach to competition in general and football specifically that he believes brings out the best in his players and this team. He's detailed it in a book titled “Win Forever,” laid it out on a website. If there are times he sounds like a self-help guru, that doesn't mean he believes it any less.

Seattle is 3-2, attempting to resurface after four consecutive losing seasons. But this isn't about vindication so much as validation of the changes he has made.

“Everything that now is the philosophy, the approach, the mentality, the language, everything came out of that experience,” Carroll said. “It is classically one of those deals where you get kicked in the tail and come back better. I hate to learn the hard way. I like the other guys to learn the hard way. It did give me an opportunity to put something in motion that I'm really, really proud of.”

Hazards of the job

Hired to be fired.

It's a description coaches use to emphasize the reality that their jobs have a shelf life. And the details of Carroll's departure from New England were pretty standard as far as coaching dismissals go. He had been hired to replace Bill Parcells in 1997, inheriting a team that had gone 12-4 and reached the Super Bowl. The Patriots won 10 games in Carroll's first year, nine the second and he was fired after finishing 8-8 and missing the playoffs his third year.

“At the time, we had a lot of immature players,” said Willie McGinest, a player from that team who is now an NFL Network analyst. “Some of the players that we had just didn't buy into the system … We just couldn't put it all together.”

There was a culture clash, too. Carroll's West Coast persona was a little too laid back when contrasted to the old-salt approach of not only Parcells, but the man who succeeded Carroll with the Patriots, Bill Belichick.

Belichick was a second-chance hire, as well, let go by Cleveland as the Browns left town in 1995 after going 36-44 in five seasons. He made the playoffs once, and was known as Garbage Bag Bill for his penchant for wearing a rain poncho on the sidelines.

Since replacing Carroll in New England, Belichick has appeared in five Super Bowls and won three of them, the most sustained success of any franchise since the salary-cap era started in 1994.

Did Belichick reinvent himself after that firing?

“Um, no,” he said in a telephone interview this week.

That's a football coach's answer, defying introspection, and making the unspoken assertion that it was as much the situation as the coaching that was responsible for earlier struggles.