Pete Carroll on New England's Gillette Stadium crowd: 'It's not a great place'

A decade before he took over as coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Pete Carroll was fired from the same position on the New England Patriots, two years before the franchise won its first Super Bowl. Adding insult to injury, Carroll’s now infamous decision to throw the ball on second-and-goal from the 1-yard line with 26 remaining in Super Bowl XLIX helped deliver the most recent of New England’s four titles.

So, despite leading Seattle to its own Super Bowl crown between those two bookends, Carroll’s first foray into Gillette Stadium since either event had him a little more pumped and jacked than usual.

“It was pretty fun,” Carroll said during his weekly 710 ESPN Seattle appearance. “I’ve gotta admit, I haven’t had more fun just enjoying a win, really. So, there’s some stuff in there somewhere. But it was a freakin’ blast — the game was, the way that people were yelling at me walking on and off the field.”

Carroll added of the heckling: “Oh, gosh, there was a lot of, ‘Thanks for throwing it.’ That kind of stuff, you know? All that kind of garbage. They were just being themselves. It was great. It was classic.”

Given the ribbing Carroll received in New England, you might understand how he could prefer the atmosphere in Seattle, which is perhaps why he described the New England crowd as just, “OK.”

While there was a pretty resounding applause on Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s 33-yard pass to Julian Edelman that set up a first-and-goal from the nine-yard line early in the fourth quarter, the crowd was fairly subdued on the field goal once the drive ended with a five-yard sack on third down. It was one of several New England drives that stalled in the red zone during Seattle’s 31-24 victory.

For his part, Carroll described the stadium in Foxboro as a “a gorgeous setting, beautiful arena and the fans, just the whole thing, it’s really classy — really classy.” But, obviously, he prefers Seattle, where Seahawks fans twice set a since broken Guinness World Record for loudest crowd noise at a sporting even and twice registered a magnitude 1 or 2 earthquake on stadium seismometers.

As a result, Seattle has retired a No. 12 jersey in honor of a fandom dubbed the 12th man. Meanwhile, New Englanders are probably pretty comfortable with their team retiring No. 12 for a different reason.

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Ben Rohrbach is a contributor for Ball Don’t Lie and Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach