Pete Carroll: NCAA driven by 'bitterness' against USC

Pete Carroll-led teams always have been competitive.

That competitiveness has helped him reach consecutive Super Bowls with the Seattle Seahawks, including an NFL championship in 2014.

That drive was also on display at USC, where Carroll had a run the likes of which college football might never see again.

Carroll's 'SC teams competed hard and won a lot. The Trojans' winning ways struck a nerve with some, though, mainly the NCAA, Carroll said Saturday prior to being inducted into the USC Hall of Fame.

Fourteen of the team's victories were stripped when the NCAA determined that the school had committed infractions, including agent and amateurism violations involving Reggie Bush.

"We had so much success and we had so much fun doing it that it was uncommon for people to understand why and how we could have done it that way," Carroll said. "I think it rubbed people the wrong way. We went to some places that people hadn't gone before.... There was such a bitterness, it seems like, to drive them to where they went that it had to be pretty deep."

Despite the sanctions that followed -- including vacating Reggie Bush's Heisman Trophy as well as the university disassociating itself from Bush; relinquishing the 2004 BCS championship; a two-year bowl ban and loss of scholarships -- Carroll always has insisted the USC program did things the right way under his watch.

"The thing that I find most unfortunate is that from the outside looking they didn't realize how many people we touched in those days and how much relationship-building we did in the community and with the people that followed us at practice," Carroll said. "There were kids from all walks. There were grandmas and grandpas, and aunts and uncles, and people from the streets, and from the entertainment world that would come by at times that made it just an enriched environment that made it an experience for the kids that were playing in our program extraordinary, because they had to deal with people of all kinds. And they did it with an open heart and they did it with kindness and a consideration and a humility that it was a rare educational opportunity.

"But the people from the outside in could never understand how it could have been like that. That's the way I saw it and that's the way I felt and I thought it was always the right thing, is we engaged so many people, and it was a thrill to see our kids in those settings and situations where they got a chance to interact."

USC is now in a position in which it can try to reclaim some of what it lost, perhaps some form of restitution after the NCAA was forced to release controversial emails related to USC's sanctions. The messages were released earlier this year as part of former USC running backs coach Todd McNair's defamation lawsuit.

Carroll says McNair's fight for his reputation over the years is "really stellar." McNair has not worked since the sanctions came down on USC and has immersed himself in legal battles against the NCAA.

The "bitterness" or "venom" against USC, as Carroll has described it in the past, was exposed in those emails that were released in McNair's case.

"We felt very strongly about the whole thing, all the way throughout, what had taken place and all that," Carroll said. "It doesn't surprise me that it took stuff like that to get them to their conclusions that they got to.

"It breaks my heart that (the sanctions) happened to the university and for the kids that were playing here and for the fans that were following it because it wasn't dealt with properly and it wasn't done rightly. Hopefully, that will be cleared but the fact that they had to go through it was terrible. And I'm ... will always feel saddened by that."