When the Raiders and minority owner Tom Brady were looking for a new coach, they turned to a 70-something Super Bowl winner. But not Bill Belichick.
Pete Carroll got the job, and he quickly won over the locker room — even before he destroyed a whiteboard prior to the Week 1 win over Brady’s Patriots.
“It doesn’t matter who we’re going against, and I’m dead serious when I say this, he’s a super competitive human being, no matter who it is,” defensive end Maxx Crosby said on the latest episode of SiriusXM’s Let’s Go! podcast. “Like, he’ll find a reason to get competitive, and that’s why I get along with him and that’s why the guys love him, because like, in my head, I’ll have to come up with stuff sometimes to give me an edge, you know what I mean? And he’s that same way. Every week, every practice, no matter if we’re doing a joint practice versus the Niners, he’s got a story that he comes up with and hits us with something. So he has a great way of reaching the team in a lot of different ways.”
It won’t be hard to come up with something tonight, since the 1-0 Raiders face their AFC West rivals, the 1-0 Chargers.
“Every game is super important, but you know when it’s time against your division opponent,” Crosby said. “Those games carry a little bit of extra weight. They’re all very important, but they do carry extra weight. And you could feel it in the stadium. You feel it during the week, all the shit talk back and forth from the fans and all that. It means a lot. We know the history. The Chargers are a huge rival for us. There’s some bad blood on both sides.”
There’s a little extra bad blood because it reunites Carroll with longtime rival Jim Harbaugh. When host Jim Gray asked Crosby about that angle, he said it’s “something [Carroll] doesn’t really talk about much.”
Which, as Gray pointed out, means that Carroll has talked about it some.
The time for talking ends at 10:00 p.m. ET tonight, when Carroll celebrates his 74th birthday by trying to claim sole possession of first place in the division.
