San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh and Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll have had an ongoing dislike for each other since Harbaugh was at Stanford, and Carroll was at USC.
That dislike has ratcheted up a ton since both teams are rivals in the same division, and both teams engaged in an arms race this off-season via the draft and free agency.
Both teams will enter the 2013 season with Super Bowl aspirations. While Harbaugh’s team has taken on the personality of their coach, Carroll and his Seahawks have come under fire the past few seasons for several performance enhancing drug suspensions.
Bruce Irvin became the sixth Seahawks player since 2010 to be suspended, and several of those suspensions were for Adderall use as well.
Harbaugh was asked Tuesday about the Seahawks PED issues, and according to Yahoo Sports, did not hold back when unleashed his own dose of ether on Pete Carroll’s team.
New on Shutdown Corner — Jim Harbaugh on Seahawks: ‘If you cheat to win, you’ve already lost’ http://t.co/j3N0QgBXvo
— SC_DougFarrar (@SC_DougFarrar) June 11, 2013
”Is it a concern? I’ve definitely noticed it,” Harbaugh said of the Seahawks. ”You don’t know what it is. Even when people say what it is, you don’t know that that’s what it is. I’ve heard this thrown out or that, but that’s usually the agents or the players themselves saying it’s, for example, Adderall. But theNFL doesn’t release what it actually is, so you have no idea. You’re taking somebody at their word that I don’t know if you can take them at their word, understanding the circumstances.”
”It has no place in an athlete’s body. Play by the rules,” Harbaugh said of substances prohibited by the league. ”You always want to be above reproach, especially when you’re good, because you don’t want people to come back and say, ‘They’re winning because they’re cheating.’ That’s always going to be a knee-jerk reaction in my experience, ever since I was a little kid. We want to be above reproach in everything and do everything by the rules. Because if you don’t, if you cheat to win, then you’ve already lost, according to Bo Schembechler. And Bo Schembechler is about next to the word of God as you can get in my mind. It’s not the word of God, but it’s close.”
These two teams will matchup twice this season, and don’t be shocked if they lock horns for a third time during the postseason.