Pete Carroll broke the silence months after his departure from the Seattle Seahawks. For the most part, it’s good news. After 14 years, the Super Bowl-winning coach is reuniting with the USC, but it’s not what you think at all. Apparently, Carroll will be returning to USC, but not to coach a football team, but as a professor.

However, if the opportunity to coach in the NFL ever presents itself, Carroll will be the first one to take it up. But would any team in the NFL want to do business with the 72-year-old former NFL head coach? What’s stopping teams from hiring Bill Belichick? That’s because the NFL has an “age bias” problem, according to Mike Florio, and he is not happy about it.

An unemployed Pete Carroll brings out flaws in coaching philosophy

“He’s [Carroll] going to teach a course at USC in the spring. But we know how the season goes. 32 teams they get thrown in the blender, there’s going to be good teams, there’s going to be bad teams. The bad teams are like ‘How do we get better?’ We fire our head coach we hire a new one. He wasn’t really mentioned at all last year and he’s only a year older than Bill Belichick for crying out loud. Age discrimination is very real in the NFL,” Mike Florio shared on Pro Football Talk on NBC.

It’s not clear what course “Professor Pete” is going to teach at the USC, however the school wants him to “share his knowledge and experience” with the students there. However, Carroll is really looking forward to the gig as he said, “It’s going to be a really exciting endeavor when it’s finalized and all that.” But let’s come back to what Florio just said right now.

When Bill Belichick got fired, some teams were interested in him. If you remember, Arthur Blank, the Falcons owner, took him to his yacht and had a very lengthy chat with him. However, Belichick not making the cut is a whole different thing. At least, the Falcons thought about giving him a deal. So that proves Florio’s point about “age discrimination.”

But he’s right about one more thing. Somewhere down the line in the regular season, some teams will need a new head coach. Look at what happened with the Las Vegas Raiders last year. Josh McDaniels was fired after the Raiders struggled to win games. Maybe something like that happens and Carroll gets hired.

“I could coach tomorrow,” said Carroll, who cried the day he left the Seahawks. “I’m physically in the best shape I’ve been in in a long time. I’m ready to do all the activities that I’m doing and feeling really good about it. I could, but I don’t really — I’m not desiring it at this point. This isn’t the coaching season.”

Okay, so the NFL has an age bias, and that’s established. If that’s the case, why isn’t team hiring Bill Belichick? He’s just a year younger than Carrol, right? Florio and his companions argued further about the different sides of hiring unemployed coaches.

Is hiring Bill Belichick the right move for any team?

Of course, there are positives and negatives to everything. While Belichick has huge upsides as Chris Simms points out that he “has changed 97 times just to win a football game,” and that no one has ever “evolved” as much as Belichick in his career, there are other obvious problems in his “military” like regime.

Per Florio, “The big negative with Belichick is you got to give him the keys and let him run the show.” Also, there might be power struggles between Belichick and the GM because for too long, Belichick was the GM and the head coach of the New England Patriots. The point is, he does the scouting and chooses whom to draft. That approach might not sit well with a modern inclusive version of the NFL.

Will the league’s obsession with “young” and “cheap” coaches slowly diminish the possibility of coaches like Belichick and Carroll to ever return to the NFL? What do you think? For now, Pete Carroll and Bill Belichick are living their best lives away from the football field after more than 4 decades of coaching.

That was clear when Carroll closed off the dialogue by saying, “I’m not thinking that I’m holding my breath and that kind of thing. If it’s been 40-something years, 48 years or whatever coaching, and that’s it, I’ll feel OK about that.”

If you want to find out Chris Gronkowski’s take on his NFL journey, and other things, check out the Dual Threat Podcast with BG12.