re: Is Miles a Top 10 head coach?

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13. NO MATTER WHAT I WRITE, IT WILL BE WRONG

I could write that Carroll failed as a head coach in the National Football League, that he didn’t hit his stride, didn’t find himself, until he returned to college ball. It’s the most common knock against him, and his NFL record (33-31) was less than dazzling. But I could just as easily write that Carroll deserved more time, that he was done in by idiot fans and trigger-happy NFL owners who didn’t recognize his strengths. Given more time, Carroll would have become one of the best. “He never really had a chance to establish himself,” says Boomer Esiason, who quarterbacked for the New York Jets when Carroll was the coach. Esiason calls the day Carroll got fired “the saddest day of my professional life. I basically went from a Ph.D. to an elementary school education in about 15 minutes.”

I could write that Carroll was too soft on his players in the NFL"it might be the worst charge that could be leveled at a football coach. It’s been leveled at Carroll plenty, and he winces when he repeats it. But I could just as easily write that Carroll’s positive attitude, his native optimism and idealism, find more receptive ears among young players, who haven’t yet become cynical, who don’t play for money.

I could write that Carroll’s restoration of USC’s glory, his resurrection of a prowess and cachet that date back to the 1920s, is one of the most impressive achievements in the annals of college football, so fast and dramatic that it borders on miraculous. Carroll took a team that had become a nonfactor, that hadn’t won a national championship in 22 years, and turned it into a machine. His stars made a habit of collecting Heismans as if it were their birthright" three winners in four years, a feat no other school has achieved. No one would have dared say I was wrong"until this season. When USC fell to Stanford, you could hear the critics clearing their throats, rehearsing their revisionist histories and eulogies of the Carroll Era. Maybe the magic is gone, they said. Maybe Carroll benefited from a crew of talented assistants, they said, guys like offensive mastermind Norm Chow, who left to become offensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans, and Lane Kiffin, who left to become head coach of the Oakland Raiders, and Ed Orgeron, who’s now coaching the University of Mississippi.

Just wait. Another few losses, another season or two without a championship, and the critics will get louder. Carroll was overrated, they’ll say. He got lucky, they’ll say. He came along at the same moment as a rare cluster of once-in-a-lifetime players, they’ll say. He’s lost his Trojan mojo.

Carroll knows what they’ll say, and when he hears it, when he feels that he’s losing the players, losing the fans, losing momentum, or just losing, he might leave. Regardless of the contract extension he signed in 2005, details of which he declines to discuss, he’s not likely to stay where he’s not wanted, or where his message is no longer working. “I never want to coach again when it’s not like this,” he says. “I won’t hang on for dear life. I love winning so much that I can’t imagine being here when it’s any other way.”

I could write that, even if he does leave, he’ll never go back to the NFL, where he was booed and labeled a failure. “There’s no way,” he says, and Esiason agrees. “I don’t know if there’s nirvana for Pete Carroll"but I know it’s not in the pros.” And yet. When I press Carroll, I can’t help feeling that he hedges. “There’s no franchise, there’s no ownership, there’s no philosophy,” he says. “The only thing it would give me would be credibility. That you’re the best in the world.”

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