RENTON, Wash. -- Remembering Paul Allen a day after his passing, Pete Carroll said never "in a million years" would he have left USC had it not been for the late Seattle Seahawks owner. Carroll was referring to the vision and the spirit that Allen expressed while making a convincing sales pitch, the likes of which Carroll hadn't heard from any other NFL owner.
If not for what Allen did more than a decade before Carroll arrived in 2010, though, there likely wouldn't have been an NFL team to come to in Seattle.
The saga of the team's near departure in the mid-1990s is worth revisiting in the wake of Allen's death on Monday at age 65 due to complications from non-Hodgkins lymphoma.