Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll: Our goal isn’t to win the Super Bowl

As the Seahawks season begins, many fans are thinking about a Super Bowl repeat, but that’s not on Coach Pete Carroll’s mind.

“It maybe would surprise you a little bit, but our goal isn’t to win the Super Bowl,” Carroll told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson in the season’s first edition of The Pete Carroll Show.

Even though most of the players now have a Super Bowl ring, you won’t hear much talk about that in the locker room, Carroll said.

“The language that we hear so much about the Super Bowl is […] everybody is playing for the ring and all that stuff. We never talk like that around here because I hope we can get a mindset that will allow us to play for championships more than just one time and we can build on something really special.”

Carroll told Monson he doesn’t want anyone thinking they’ve already achieved the goal with last season’s championship win. So the real focus is to play as well as they can for as long as they can.

“That’s really what guides us,” Carroll said. “So that we’re not faced with this thing where we conquered it all and we’re done, and now we have to recreate it.”

This message is nothing new. Carroll said this is a mindset they’ve tried to establish since he came to Seattle.

“We started this conversation really five years ago, so hopefully it’s somewhat embedded and we can handle things well and continue to play well.”

The mindset appears to be working so far, and Carroll said at Thursday’s season opener they’ll be aiming to play well, as always.

“We want to play great tonight and see if we can get this season rolling on a great starting note.”