The Touchdown Maker

By Jack Holmes

Fall 2024

For Pete Carmichael Jr., it all started with some cables.

Back in the early eighties, it was someone’s job—usually a coach’s kid—to follow former Boston College head coach Jack Bicknell around on the sideline, minding the cord that trailed behind him from his headset. For a time, that task fell to young Pete, whose father, Pete Sr., was a longtime assistant coach on the team. And that gig, he recalled, supplied a core memory: “Holding the headsets for Coach Bicknell in the Miracle in Miami.” Carmichael was just thirteen years old when he got a sideline view of Doug Flutie’s sixty-three-yard Hail Mary touchdown pass that snatched victory from the 1984 Miami Hurricanes.

He's fifty-two now, and when we spoke in August, he was deep into preparations for his twenty-first season as an NFL coach. He’d recently been hired by the Denver Broncos after seventeen years—and a Super Bowl ring—with the New Orleans Saints. But those early days as a kid volunteer at BC, he said, were what convinced him that coaching was “what I wanted to do when I got older.”

For a while there, though, it was about baseball as much as football. Carmichael played both in high school before realizing he could go further on the diamond than the gridiron. He got an offer to play in BC’s infield, and ended up a four-year letterman and captain. It was after graduation that football returned to center stage in his life.

In 1994, he got a job working with the offensive line at the University of New Hampshire that paid nothing—like, actually zero. But it was “a great opportunity to start learning the game at a different level,” he said. The next year, he joined the coaching staff at Louisiana Tech, where “we were starting to build an offense from scratch.”

Then, in 2000, the NFL came calling. Like most any other job, Carmichael said, it came down to networking. His dad was friendly with Cleveland Browns head coach Chris Palmer. “I had a chance to interview,” he recalled, “and was fortunate enough to get the job.” He was just twenty-eight years old, and some of the players were older than he was, he said, but “great players want to be coached. Football is football.”

He moved on to Washington and then to the San Diego Chargers, where he first ran into a young quarterback named Drew Brees. He was stunned by the second-year signal-caller’s professionalism, “how he handles his business,” and as fate would have it, the two of them each moved to the New Orleans Saints in the summer of 2006. Carmichael worked closely with Brees throughout his time in New Orleans, as quarterbacks coach, passing game coordinator, and, eventually, offensive coordinator. Brees led the league in passing seven times under Carmichael and head coach Sean Payton, and retired second in NFL history in career passing yards, touchdown passes, and completion percentage.

Carmichael was promoted to Saints offensive coordinator heading into the 2009 season, and what a season it was. New Orleans started 13–0 before storming through the playoffs and into a matchup with Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLIV. The Saints took the game 31–17, securing the first and only major professional sports championship for the city of New Orleans, a crowning moment in a glorious run that helped deliver the Big Easy into a new era after the horrors and heartbreak of Hurricane Katrina.

The years that followed were not as kind, however, featuring crushing playoff losses and periods where the Saints defense failed to match the offense. Brees retired after the 2020 season, and Payton left the team the next year. The Saints missed the playoffs in the three years that followed, and Carmichael soon got a reminder that top-level football is a ruthless business. He was one of three offensive coaches dismissed after last season.“

"We didn’t get it done and so changes were made,” he said. “No hard feelings. My children grew up in Louisiana, and that’s their home. Everything worked out perfectly for my family. It’s a business where sometimes you’ll be on a staff with another coach who says, ‘Oh, I’ve had to move my children five times in their school years.’ I was just fortunate enough not to have to do that.”

He wasn’t out of work for long. Payton, who was hired last season as head coach of the Broncos, brought him in as senior offensive assistant coach. “Pete’s an outstanding football coach and really a great teammate on our staff,” Payton said. “There’s a calming presence that Pete brings, which the players appreciate, and I think it comes from his experience and even-keeled personality.”

The Broncos have some work to do this season coming off an 8–9 record last year, but “there's a great feeling in this building,” Carmichael said. “We expect to win.” They’ve got a brand-new project on offense in rookie quarterback Bo Nix, and it’s a new city and a new division for Carmichael. But he knows his way around this league—and what’s required when that crisp autumn air rolls in.