The Seahawks travel to Philadelphia to face the Eagles this weekend, which means Pete Carroll is going to be facing a former player of his in the form of quarterback Mark Sanchez.
Carroll facing a former player, especially one playing the game’s most important position, would be interesting regardless of who that quarterback was, but because it’s Sanchez, the Carroll-vs.-former-pupil angle is a bit juicier. In case you forgot, Carroll was a bit critical of Sanchez’s decision to leave USC early after the 2008 season, saying Sanchez would be better off waiting to go to the NFL (video below).
But if Sanchez is still bitter about those comments from Carroll, he did a heck of a job hiding it when the topic was brought up on a conference call with Seattle-area reporters.
“It seems so long ago now,” Sanchez said. “We just disagreed, and it became something bigger than it really was. We just disagreed about one thing, and that’s OK. We disagreed about a lot of things over the years, friends do that, that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. There were never any hard feelings. He didn’t wish me ill will or hope I played poorly or anything like that; he just expressed his opinion. I had made up my mind and knew what I wanted to do, and that was it. It kind of took on a life of it’s own in the media.
“I took it as a form of respect, to be honest, because I love Coach Carroll, I always have and always will. I think he’s one of the best, not just coaches, but people I’ve ever been around, and such a great motivator, and more than a coach, he’s a teacher. So I took it as a form of respect that he wanted me back on his team, and that meant the world to me because I had so much fun playing for him. That’s never been an issue.”
Sanchez noted that Carroll reached out to him during the preseason, Sanchez’s first with the Eagles: “He texted me during the preseason and said, ‘Hey man, it’s so good to see you out there playing again and having fun and playing it the way you know how. Keep competing,’ and stuff like that like he always used to tell me.”
Since Sanchez was injured for much of last season, he was able to keep tabs on the Seahawks from afar, and was rooting for Carroll.
“It’s great to see how successful he is and how well they did last year, I was fired up for him,” he said. “I couldn’t play, so you just kind of root for your friends.”
Sanchez said that when he watched the Super Bowl with his family, he got an inclination early on that the Seahawks were going to run away with the game. Sanchez felt that way because it reminded him of how USC often played in bowl games under Carroll.
“I remember in the first quarter, I looked at my dad and said, ‘Dad, they’re going to blow the doors off this thing. They might route ‘em. It’s going to get ugly,’” Sanchez said. “My dad said, ‘No, no they’re coming back, it’s going to be a tight one down the stretch.’ I said, ‘I don’t know, man. These guys are too excited, they’re too energetic, they’re having too much fun and they’re too prepared. It’s just going to go bananas.’ And that’s exactly what happened. You could feel it, you could see it watching them, and it was so cool. It was so cool to watch that.”
As for the question of “what if?” Sanchez said he doesn’t think about how his life and career might have been different had he played one more season at USC.
“Honestly, in the position I was in, I really felt like either way, things would have been great,” Sanchez said. “Either way, I would have worked my butt off to make sure things worked out, whether that was in school or the NFL, and I’m still doing that now. I chose my path, and now you live it out to be the right decision no matter what happens. It’s been an incredible experience, and I wouldn’t change a thing.”
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