Let’s be brutally honest for a second: If Pete Carroll is not your coach, dude is downright insufferable. There’s the gum chomping. There’s the boyish hooting and hollering. There’s the cheese-dick “Always Compete” mantras and the tendency to invite Macklemore into the locker room. From the outside looking in, it’s all a bit much. So what’s the good news? Carroll is your coach, at least as long as you’re a Seahawks fan, and what he (and GM John Schneider) have managed to do in four short years at the helm here is nothing short of remarkable: He’s turned a perennial NFL laughingstock into the best team in the league, and turned convention on its ear in the process. He’s reinvented the blueprint for success, proving you can win—and win big—with a quarterback who’s too small and a team of inspired players whom everyone else passed on. He’s gone from an NFL loser to a winner in Seattle, and he’s taken us all with him. Just ask the other 31 teams in the league that are feverishly trying to copy everything the Seahawks have built. Right now, no one’s doing it better than Pete Carroll.

Read all of our picks for Sports & Adventure, and explore the rest of this year’s edition of Best of Seattle.