The workings of life are strange. Two different people might not want to cross paths ever again, but they somehow keep bumping into each other. Two people with complicated histories manage to intersect again and again, reminding them of a turbulent past. So it is for Pete Carroll and Jim Harbaugh, two men whose paths just won’t diverge. These two men can’t get rid of each other. Pete Carroll’s arrival as the new coach of the Las Vegas Raiders will mean Carroll will coach against Harbaugh twice per NFL season, and not for the first time.
These coaches are widely acknowledged as elite performers. One simple fact which unites them in their shared excellence: Pete Carroll and Jim Harbaugh have both won a college national championship and coached in the Super Bowl. Carroll obviously won, but the list of men to win a national title and coach in the Super Bowl is short. Jimmy Johnson and Barry Switzer are on the list. It’s a very limited club.
Jim Harbaugh has been a thorn in Pete Carroll’s side:
From 2007 through 2012, Jim Harbaugh hounded Pete Carroll at two different jobs. Harbaugh’s first San Francisco 49er teams were better and more polished than Carroll’s Seattle Seahawks. Harbaugh got the jump on Carroll in the NFL. Harbaugh also embarrassed Carroll at USC a few years earlier in 2009. Two years before that, Stanford scored the biggest point-spread upset in college football history, winning at the Coliseum as a 41-point underdog. Keeping in mind that nearly every major college football program in the insane 2007 had at least two losses going into the bowls, that USC loss to Stanford deprived the Trojans of a likely spot in the BCS National Championship Game, opposite Ohio State. USC probably would have faced the Buckeyes without that humiliation suffered at the hands of Harbaugh.
However, for all that Harbaugh has done to Carroll, it was Carroll who won the head-to-head battle when the two men met in an NFC Championship Game with the Super Bowl on the line.
Two men have reached the mountaintop and have coached at a high level, reaching numerous big games. Shared excellence is the reality Pete Carroll and Jim Harbaugh have created.