The right-hand man for Jody Allen was sitting silently a few feet in front of Pete Carroll.
That's what Bert Kolde of Vulcan, Inc., does after every Seahawks road game during the coach's postgame press conferences. Vulcan is the company that Paul Allen founded and sister Jody Allen, the team chair, heads for her late brother's estate to operate the franchise.
As Kolde listened following Seattle's season-ending, 21-20 victory at the Arizona Cardinals Sunday, Carroll said "I love this team."
His Seahawks finished the 2023 season 9-8. They did not qualify for the playoffs, for only the third time in the last 12 years with Carroll as their coach.
Does the 72-year-old Carroll, Seattle's top football authority since Paul Allen hired him away from USC in January 2010, want to run this back? Is this season enough to make him want to come back and coach again in the 2024 season?
"Yeah, yeah," Carroll said. "Of course it is. I'd love to do that."
Does he expect to be the Seahawks' coach for the 2024 season?
"I do," Carroll said. "At this point I do."
Next up: His annual after-season meeting with Jody Allen. As they do every year after a season ends, Allen will hear Carroll's and general manager John Schneider's assessments of where the Seahawks are as a team, where they see the needs to improve — particularly the porous(-again) defense and the resources it will take to improve for next season and beyond.
Carroll is under contract to be Seattle's top football authority through his 75th birthday, for the 2024 season plus an option to coach through 2025. That was from the extension to which Jody Allen signed him during the 2020 season.
Schneider is under contract with the Seahawks through the 2026 draft.
Sunday afternoon, in the aftermath of squandering control of their playoff fate with a home loss to Pittsburgh New Year's Eve, Carroll was feeling the thudding finality of not making the playoffs. That is a minimum standard for the Carroll-era Seahawks.
"A freakin' crusher. A total crusher," he said of missing the postseason.
"Because there's so many games in the season that we take with us. These games don't go away, whether it's the Rams, whether it's (a 41-35 loss at the end at) Dallas, whether it's Pittsburgh, or it's the Rams again. There's so many games like this that they just tear at you.
"That's what you have to live with, because we've done the things we needed to do to win those games and other games that we just didn't get that. We needed one more. We should have had three more to have the season that we could have had. We were capable of doing that. "
Carroll said "I'm really disappointed about that. Really disappointed, because I think we should have been better."
Geno Smith: 'Bittersweet'
Geno Smith was good enough again at the end Sunday afternoon.
His touchdown pass to Tyler Lockett with the winning two-point conversion with just under 2 minutes left was Smith's seventh go-ahead touchdown pass in the fourth quarter or overtime this season. That is the most in a season in NFL history.
Carroll and Schneider go into the early-than-expected offseason with Smith, their 33-year-old quarterback, under contract for two more years.
He isn't the team's issue. Its defense is.
Smith had a fitting word for Sunday's win but still getting sent home for the rest of the winter into spring and summer.
"I think the best way to describe it is that it is bittersweet," he said. "Obviously, it is always good to get a win. First things first, road win in the fashion that we did today. It took everybody and it came down to the wire.
"Also, for us not to be able to continue the season. For it to be ending the way that it is. For us to kind of let our own destiny slip out of our hand, that is something that frustrates me a little bit because we had a chance. We had a chance to get into the playoffs and see what we could do. We won today. That is all we could have done, is get the win today. The rest is up to what we did last week."
