Less than one month after the Seattle Seahawks cut him, LenDale White still doesn't know why -- especially when their new coach, Pete Carroll, worked with him at USC and the team is seeking running back help.
White said Wednesday that he called Carroll to find out what went wrong, but his old coach didn't provide closure.
"Pete, you know, he beat around the bush, just saying -- he just said it wasn't going to work out, they decided to go a new way," White said on WGFX-AM in Nashville, Tenn. "I asked him, 'Is it anything I did?' He didn't really give me an answer.
"When you're sitting there on the phone with somebody like that and they have no answer, it's just shocking. ... I'm not saying he did anything wrong. He didn't give me a clear explanation, but it is what it is. When you're a coach in a situation like that, you probably don't have to give anybody an explanation."
White refuted the notion that he went into Seattle assuming the running back job was his to lose. The team already had Julius Jones, Justin Forsett and Quinton Ganther at the position when it acquired White from the Tennessee Titans and Leon Washington from the New York Jets in draft-weekend trades two months ago.
"Everybody's saying that it was probably because I felt a sense of entitlement," White said. "I'm hearing all these newspapers saying I was entitled to certain things around there. I went in there, I worked out with the team. I was in at 6 a.m., did everything I could."
White, who has rushed for 2,349 yards and 24 touchdowns in four NFL seasons, said he never saw any signs that his release was coming.
"I was shocked. I'm still shocked," he said. "I would have thought if there was a problem or if anything needed to be said or done -- you know, he was my old coach -- he'd grab me to the side, whisper something in my ear, tell me to step it up or do something different. But it was something else. It wasn't trust, it was just whatever.
"Thursday when I was leaving practice, Pete Carroll hugged me and told me I was doing well. I thought everything was fine. I went to Vegas to have some fun for Memorial Day weekend, then I get a call Friday morning that said they're going in another (direction)."
On the topic of trust, White said he never had much of it with Carroll, even while playing for the coach at USC from 2003 to 2005.
"I don't know about trust. I played for him," White said. "There's guys that I did trust like (running backs coach) Todd McNair, (offensive coordinator) Lane Kiffin, even (quarterbacks coach) Steve Sarkisian. Those other guys, they're just a face. Sometimes they're just a face to an organization."
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That organization came under fire earlier this month when the NCAA stripped it of past wins and future scholarships because of various violations that took place while White and Carroll were at USC.
"I don't want to badmouth nobody. But as big as this scale was and as much as they're saying somebody took, for you not to know anything is kind of unbelievable," White said. "If you're the athletic director, I'm pretty sure you caught wind of something or somebody out there whispered something in your ear.
"When I was going to school there and we were partying too much on campus, it was crazy, coaches could show up in our dorm room and tell us to calm the partying down, but you can't tell if somebody took a $750,000 home? It's weird to me."
White said he has been humbled by his release from the Seahawks and expects to be on an NFL team once his four-game suspension for violating the league's drug policy is over.
"All I can do is continue to work hard," White said. "I'm still 225 (pounds), I'm in shape. I feel good. I'm (doing) everything right. I stay out of the limelight, I stay out of trouble and just pray that a team understands that I'm ready to play football. And when I get in there, I'm not looking back.
"I'm so hungry to play, man. That's where my life is at this point. I sat down and looked myself in the mirror and asked myself if I still wanted to play football, and my solution was yes, I want to play football for at least another five, six years. I think I have it in me, I have to get it going."
