Pete Carroll Should Keep his Mouth Shut

There was not much gray area when discussing the sanctions that hit USC a few years ago. Most people either felt that they were justified as USC had lost some control over a program that had a number of transgressions or that the NCAA had hit the program too hard as some of the mistakes were committed by individual players and not the program as a whole. One thing both sides agreed on was that coach Pete Carroll knew the sanctions were coming and jumped on the Seattle Seahawks offer in 2010 to escape them. Being that he took the pro job only a few months before the NCAA made its announcement lent a lot of credence to that notion, shared by people on both sides of the debate. It really would be impossible for Carroll to prove otherwise. Yet there he was in a recent interview claiming that he did not jump ship. He left solely because of a wonderful offer and he claimed that he did not know when, or even if, sanctions were coming. He even said that if he had known of the sanctions and their severity he would have stayed to help the program get through troubled times. Please. How could anyone believe him? Why would anyone bother? Leaving to re-prove yourself in the pros is fine but saying you would stay to help clean up your own mess is disingenuous. And USC's hiring Kiffin made the situation even worse, but that is a different story.