While new Las Vegas Raiders head coach Pete Carroll, 73, is on the fast track to becoming the oldest head coach in NFL history, the team introduced him on a day filled with new faces around the league.
Four NFL teams introduced their new head coaches with press conferences on Monday in hopes for better things in 2025. That included Liam Coen of the Jacksonville Jaguars, Aaron Glenn of the New York Jets, and Brian Schottenheimer of the Dallas Cowboys. All of them are at least 21 years younger than Carroll.
“First off, I’m not real proud of wearing this number 73 on my back, but that’s not what fires me up,” Carroll told reporters on Monday. “But it isn’t about accomplishing things to say you were worthy.”
“It’s what you’re going to do next that counts. What’s the next thing up? I laid low during this football season, and I’m teaching a class at USC that’s been a thrill,” he continued. “I have not been one step away from what we’re doing at any time and what we’re up against here. I’m just so grateful that I’ve been given the opportunity to do this again and to find it because to me it’s the very next step that we get to take that fires me up.”
Carroll has a lengthy and successful coaching career, which includes a Super Bowl win with the Seattle Seahawks and national championship with USC. He last coached the Seahawks in 2023 amid his 170–120–1 career regular season record.
Carroll joins a Raiders franchise searching for answers amid three-straight losing seasons and a revolving door for head coaches and general managers. He will have a new general manager to work with in John Spytek, who came over from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as the assistant general manager.
NFL is better when they’re crushing it,” Spytek told reporters. “To have been given that responsibility is not something I take lightly, but I am extremely honored and humbled to be up here with an opportunity out in front of us, and I cannot be more excited to get started and to get started with Coach Carroll here.”
For Spytek, he’s rejoining Raiders minority owner Tom Brady from their time in Tampa where Brady quarterbacked the team from 2020 to 2022. Carroll noted that Brady will be involved in the Raiders’ quarterback decision for 2025.
“It’s our mission to build this team up around the quarterback position. This isn’t the only spot,” Carroll said. “We happen to have the greatest of all time to help us and to see clearly, and we’re going to lean on Tom as much as we can for his insights because nobody has the insights that he has. He’s that unique.”
Besides Spytek, Tampa Bay also lost Coen to the Jaguars after serving as the offensive coordinator in 2024. Coen will look to turn around a Jaguars franchise that has five losing seasons since 2017.
“What’s the culture we want to establish, the direction in which we’re going to go and how we’re going to get there? That’s first and foremost,” Coen told reporters on Monday. “After we start to establish the standard in how we want to do things, then we’ll get into the fundamentals and techniques in which we want to participate and play the game at. Then you start to get into the scheme while continuing to educate and address the culture.”
