Pete Carroll and Bill Belichick: Role Model and Cautionary Tale

Pete Carroll is seven months older than Bill Belichick.

Most hardcore fans are aware that Carroll is older. Among casual fans, you could win a lot of bets with this information. The 63-year-old Carroll appears youthful and hearty; he could grab a box of Just for Men and dye his way down to his mid 40s if he tires of the "silver fox" look. Belichick, who turns 63 in April, looks like a bus driver forced to work past retirement age because his pension was gutted. Carroll could play an action movie hero, and it would not have to be an Expendable. Belichick would play the scowling wizard corroded by his exposure to dark sorcery.

Elaine Thompson/Associated Press

It's wrong to equate appearance with virtue. But Carroll and Belichick, viewed side-by-side, look like Kennedy and Nixon in the 1960 presidential debates. Who would you vote for? If they each knocked on the door, and neither was famous, who would you welcome into your house?

Carroll enters Super Bowl XLIX as a role model, a leader for the millennial age, a figure of vitality and a symbol for a brand of success that transcends earning money or winning football games. On the heels of Deflategate, Belichick arrives in Arizona as a cautionary tale, a grasping holdover from the days when greed was good, a reminder of what winning at all costs really costs.

It sounds trite. Judgments based on appearances will get you in trouble every time. No, we don't know these men—only their images. But they are images each man has projected and cultivated for two decades. We only know politicians and corporate executives by their images and their track records, and no one can argue with Belichick's or Carroll's track record. Appearances matter. When we seek inspiration, when we look for someone to represent what we value and what we strive for, the image becomes the substance.

Carroll looks people in the eye when he speaks. His voice is loud and clear. His eyes twinkle, even in defeat. He jokes with officials, players and sometimes even us awful, awful reporters. He plays little practical jokes to keep everyone loose. He tweets. He seems…happy.

Carroll's recognizable humanity carries over to his team. Richard Sherman is allowed to speak his mind, Marshawn Lynch to hold his peace. General manager John Schneider gets to play the "goofy boy genius" role in public without causing any organizational friction. Carroll's players get to be their own men with their own voices. Somehow, civilization itself does not crumble as a result.

Carroll is no saint. His USC program was corrupt. Carroll either lied about his knowledge of the goings-on at USC in the mid-2000s or wore a particularly potent set of blinders. There was hue and cry for all manner of penalties against Carroll when he left USC for the NFL, just as there have been calls to the guillotine for Belichick many times, from Spygate through the current pitchfork mob.

All major college programs are corrupt. It's an entire system of hypocrisy, from the millionaire coaching "educators" to the rule makers to those who feign moral outrage about the latest hands caught in the cookie jar. Carroll at least treated his players with basic decency. In a profession in which egomaniacs get rich on the backs of indentured servants, Carroll was never among the 20 or 30 worst offenders. He may have cared more about winning than anything else, but you could at least tell that he cared about something else.

Elaine Thompson/Associated Press

And then there's Belichick, mumbling and grimacing through press conferences, glowering at the most innocent questions as if he just ate a bad anchovy, acting as if revealing simple injury information would threaten homeland security. Belichick treats fame like a burden and our attention as a distraction, as if he would rather win football games in empty stadiums without television cameras, savoring the results like chess victories in Central Park. He has nurtured a culture of suspicion and paranoia that makes Gillette Stadium feel like the Pentagon. Patriots players are afraid to divulge even the most obvious details. Football in Foxborough is a drearily serious business.

Whether Belichick is lying his way through Deflategate is immaterial. Lying and deflections are what press conferences are for. They should just be renamed Lie and Deflection Conferences. Powerful people lie because the rest of us overreact to everything; no one knows how to handle the truth at the dawn of the social networking era. Faced with a ridiculous controversy, Belichick has provided his own version of ridiculous responses.

The problem is that we never hear Belichick tell the truth, just cliches and mutterings of the obvious, delivered as if talking itself were painful. We never hear what he really thinks about a player, a decision or a sunny day. The public Belichick disappeared into a cocoon years ago. He's built a fortress to keep the enemies out, but it doesn't let a heck of a lot of fresh air and sunlight in either.

The private Belichick is very different from the public Belichick. The private Belichick, those who know him attest, is personable, talkative and a little mischievous. You would enjoy beer and wings with the private Belichick as much as the private Carroll.

But why dig such a moat between the public and private? There's more at work than the desire for privacy. Secrecy became an end in itself for Belichick somewhere along the way. He chose to project a miserly, successful misery. He created a persona America is prone to distrust.

Maybe it helped win some games. Is that all that matters? How many wins would you trade to be perceived as a positive, dynamic, relatively trustworthy, likable individual? Carroll's success suggests that it's not an either-or situation: You can have both. Carroll gets to be the rah-rah high school gym teacher who made good. Belichick sold your uncle that huge mortgage back in 2006.

Role models do not have to be 100 percent good, or cautionary tales even a little evil. We teach our children to do their jobs to the best of their abilities, of course. But we also tell them to love what they do. We want them to be open and forthright with others, to tackle even the most unpleasant fry cook or litter box tasks with a positive attitude, to whistle while they work. No one wants a child to grow up to be rich and dissatisfied. We want them grounded and rounded, successful in ways that go beyond the bottom line.

We want our kids to grow up to be like the Super Bowl coach who acts happy to be there.

And when we are approach our mid-60s, when we have reached the furthest pinnacles of our careers and have written the bulk of our autobiographies, none of us wants to be in an empty mansion polishing championship rings. We want to be healthy, physically and emotionally, and to project that well-being. We want to be admired. We want to be loved.

Elise Amendola/Associated Press

Carroll and Belichick are each all of these things, really, both of them. One of them just has an unusual way of showing it.

Patriots fans are howling if they have made it this far. To heck with your lazy characterization of Belichick as Voldemort, they exclaim, probably not in those words. Belichick's job is to win games and bring parades to the streets of Boston, not make America love him. This nation was built by men and women who work the extra hour instead of heading to the gym or dreaming up practical jokes, who close ranks and keep secrets in the name of success even when it makes them unpopular, who chase tiny, marginal gains to the fringes of the law's letter, who make personal sacrifices and risk criticism in pursuit of the bottom line. It's not about looking great or feeling great, but being great.

Fair enough, Patriots fans. But right here, right now, on the eve of the Super Bowl, in the wake of Deflategate, who would you rather trade places with, body and mind, heart, career and soul: Bill Belichick or Pete Carroll?

Thought so.

Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report.