Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll is a confident guy.
You'd have to be in order to take the licks a professional football coach takes and continually come back for more. Failed stints with the New York Jets and New England Patriots may have daunted a lesser man - (Nick Saban for instance...) but not Carroll. He took those failures as learning opportunities, returned to the college ranks to hone his coaching skills and then burst back on the NFL scene a little older, wiser and with a clearer message.
Carroll is going to need every last ounce of that confidence going into his team's matchup this weekend with the Philadelphia Eagles and head coach Chip Kelly's vaunted up-tempo offensive attack. If his comments this week are any indication, Carroll is already feeling pretty good about the Seahawks' chances.
"We know that they'll go real fast," Carroll said, per Danny O'Neil of mynorthwest.com. "We'll see how much they want to do that. We're not concerned about that, really. We practice like that all the time because you never know when a team is going to do it."
Sounds like Carroll is pretty confident his defense can handle whatever Kelly and quarterback Mark Sanchez throw at them. But they wouldn't be the first team to think that they can handle the offensive tempo, only to eventually be overwhelmed after four quarters of having their defense stretched, horizontally and vertically, to every corner of the field.
"It was fast," Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman Jeremy Mincey said of the Eagles's offense after his team surrendered 33 points to Philadelphia in a Thanksgiving Day loss. "You have to give them credit. They did a good job of game planning us. We were losing gaps, which we usually don't do."
Carroll and the illustrious Legion of Boom defensive backfield, led by cornerback Richard Sherman, may be as well-equipped as any team in the league to deal with Kelly's break-neck offensive pace though. Physically they jam receivers at the line, knocking them off their routes and disrupting the timing and rhythm of the passing game. Mentally, the backs often use only a single word for most of their calls.
In a game against Bill Belichick's Patriots two season ago, Tom Brady and the New England offense managed to get some plays off in as little as 12 seconds, from snap to snap. The Seahawks went on to win that game, 24-23.
"It doesn't change anything for us," Sherman said. "We've dealt with tempo for a couple of years now. We've dealt with the Patriots' tempo, Denver a few times with their tempo. It doesn't change a thing for us. We play disciplined, sound football. It gives you more opportunities."
Seattle currently allows the third fewest passing yards (199.4) and the fifth fewest rushing yards (86.3) per game in the league. Philadelphia manages the fifth most passing yards (286.0) and the sixth most rushing yards (130.2) per game.
As the Seahawks and the Eagles prepare to battle Sunday afternoon in an NFC matchup featuring two of the best teams in the league, pre-game confidence will, no doubt, continue to flow.
But by the end of the day, one team will have to head back home to lick their wounds and figure out a way to repair a confidence either buried by unrelenting waves of offense or broken by a granite wall of defense.
