The definitive surprise of this NFL coaching cycle

In a few hours, Pete Carroll will begin preparations for his fourth head coaching stint in the NFL after a one-year hiatus from the profession. Carroll reached an agreement with the Las Vegas Raiders on Friday morning, becoming just the third coach in NFL history to command four different franchises, joining Marty Schottenheimer and Bill Parcells. If you’ve been following along with our coaching carousel predictionsthis move shouldn’t come as a surprise, especially after Ben Johnson agreed to become the next head coach of the Chicago Bears.

In recent weeks, Carroll was firmly cemented as the Raiders’ Plan B in case a pursuit of Johnson went awry or never got off the ground.

But now that the hiring of Carroll has been completed, we have a number of eyebrow-raising trends that have converged to underscore what I still believe to be the definitive surprise of the cycle.

Barring an absolutely stunning change of direction from the Dallas Cowboys, Bill Belichick will begin spring practice as the football coach at the University of North Carolina. And thanks to Carroll, none of the excuses we’ve heard about teams eschewing Belichick have managed to withstand the hiring cycle.

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• There were fears that Belichick, at 72, was too old. However, Carroll will turn 74 at the start of the 2025 season, making him the oldest Week 1 head coach in NFL history (a distinction previously held by Romeo Crennel). In this cycle, we’ve seen Steve Spagnuolo (65) and Todd Monken (soon to be 59) also receive serious and well-deserved consideration. Mike McCarthy (who will be 62 during the 2025 season) remains a very serious candidate for the New Orleans Saints job and was likely a serious candidate for the Bears had Johnson gone elsewhere. Aaron Glenn, will be 53 before the start of his first Jets training camp, which, while not old, would have made Glenn one of the older coaches hired in last year’s cycle (Jim Harbaugh, 61, is the oldest).

• There was a concern about Belichick and defensive-minded head coaches in general. Now, with Carroll, we have a majority of the coaches hired so far this cycle (Mike Vrabel, Aaron Glenn, Carroll) who would be considered defensive head coaches. Last year, defensive coaches also outscored offensive coaches five to three in the cycle.

• There were questions about money, power and time. Belichick, via some industry palaver, is said to have turned off potential teams because of the way he ran an insular form of monarchy in New England. From that moment on, the Patriots hired Vrabel, who, although a different person, had amassed a lot of power in Tennessee before he and the Titans went their separate ways. Liam Coen essentially had a general manager in Trent Baalke ousted in the midst of the hiring process in Jacksonville. The Raiders also fired general manager Tom Telesco after Telesco, in his only season in the team’s top personnel role, drafted one of the most productive rookies—Brock Bowers—in NFL history. This was seen at the time as a move to make the job look more suitable for Johnson, who had preferred the potential to become a general manager. And in fact, the hiring of future Raiders GM John Spytek was seen as a possible rejection for Johnson that helped push him further into the arms of the Bears. While none of these positions create a Belichickian monarchy per se, there is absolutely no question that Vrabel, Johnson and Coen are infinitely more powerful than anyone else in the building other than the owner entering the regular season in 2025.

If there was a reluctance to pay Belichick at the top of the market, we haven’t seen that reluctance to spend from the Bears, Patriots and Jaguars. All of these teams blew past industry standard prices to secure the head coaches they wanted. If there was a gray area about the length of a Belichick contract, the Raiders seemed to have no problem striking a deal on an unorthodox three-plus-one deal, with a fourth year serving as a team option. The industry standard for coaches is now between five and six seasons, which was boosted from an earlier age when four-plus-one contracts were fairly standard.

While we can’t know where any of this is going, we do know there were a lot of teams desperate for quality coaching this offseason. The Patriots fired Belichick’s owner-selected successor after just one year, torpedoed a promising young coaching career, just to get the position back on track. The Jaguars rode the absolute razor’s edge of gentlemanly behavior in fear of losing Coen and likely still earned them a lifetime of sideways glances from their neighboring franchise in Florida.

And somewhere, one of the greatest head coaches in NFL history who absolutely wanted one of those jobs at the start of the 2024 season, knocking on the recruitment trail at Bergen’s Catholic high school. The hiring of Carroll kind of rounds out the nonsensical nature of it all, unless, of course, there’s something about Belichick’s oeuvre that we don’t fully understand. Either way, he’ll have to use his own stage to prove the seven hiring teams this cycle right or horribly wrong in forcing him to stay there.