Pete Carroll looked like a man who knew he had just thrown the NFL’s most impactful red challenge flag of the 2020 season.
The second half of Sunday night’s game against the Vikings was six minutes old. The purple-clad visitors to Seattle’s CenturyLink Field were up 13-7. And the officials had just ruled that Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins had thrown an incomplete pass on third-and-17 from deep inside his own territory.
Carroll, the Seahawks’ ageless bundle of coaching energy, hadn’t thrown a challenge flag all season. But his assistants in the booth above told him to fire away.