After limping to a 4-13 finish last season, the Las Vegas Raiders needed a transformation. Enter Pete Carroll, the 73-year-old NFL wild card whose energy rivals rookies half his age and whose coaching style looks more like a linebacker drill than a boardroom strategy session.

And just weeks into the job, he’s already spilled blood on the practice field.

In a recent appearance on The Get Got Pod with Marshawn Lynch and Mike Robinson, Carroll couldn’t contain his enthusiasm.

“It’s really really fun. It’s fun as hell,” Carroll said. “I was bleeding on the practice field. I hooked somebody or something, you know.”

Robinson tried to reign him in, joking: “You gotta calm down, man. You’re in your 70s, bro. Relax!”

But Carroll, still running on espresso and adrenaline, dismissed the idea with a grin and a deflective, “No, I’m not into anything.”

Carroll’s presence is environment-shifting

What Carroll brings isn’t just caffeine-fueled chaos. It’s structure disguised as unpredictability. Defensive star Maxx Crosby put it best on the Glory Daze podcast: “If you’re not part of the culture, like you’re going to stand out like a sore thumb…It’s like constant competition.”

“You’re excited to hear what he’s got to say in the meetings because you don’t know what the f*** is about to happen, and that’s just how he is.”

Rookie workouts have been so intense that guys are reportedly throwing up during drills. Malcolm Koonce pointed it out and Maxx Crosby welcomed it.

He’s also proving that age is just a number, especially when that number still hits sleds and sprints across the field like it’s 1999. It’s no accident that Raiders vets and rookies alike are talking about culture now. Not in the stale, HR-brochure way most franchises throw around the term, but in the visceral, full-contact kind of way that Carroll embodies.

Some assumed this was a “legacy hire,” a symbolic gesture to bridge the gap between dysfunction and whatever comes next. But Carroll isn’t pacing the sidelines in Vegas like a caretaker. He’s shaking the walls.

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