Fans incensed at Pete Carroll flinging gum on ground during 49ers rout

Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll’s obsessive gum chewing during games is well documented. According to The Sporting News, Carroll — a classic Bubble Yum chewer — chomps through “roughly 15 pieces of gum per game and around 260 pieces of gum per season.” ESPN’s Adam Schefter once did an entire segment on a German Seahawks superfan who has a piece of gum chewed by Carroll in a memorabilia case.

But where those 15 pieces of gum per game end up has been covered far less.

Fans watching the San Francisco 49ers rout Seattle on Thanksgiving night got a slow-motion glimpse into what he does with his thoroughly chewed gum once he’s done with it. Thanks to an NBC camera operator, viewers saw Carroll flinging his gum wad into a crowd of sideline personnel, who narrowly dodged it as it instead fell to the sidelines. That set off a firestorm of comments on social media calling out the grossness and laziness of the act.

“Pete Carroll is an absolute monster of a human for just throwing his gum like that into a crowd,” one fan noted.

“This dude Pete Carroll is a maniac just tossing his gum into the stands and then popping another 7 pieces in,” another quipped.

“If there someone responsible for picking up Pete Carroll’s gum?” former San Jose Earthquakes general manager Alexi Lalas asked.

Carroll making little to no effort to throw his used gum into a trash can or back into a wrapper like a normal human apparently isn’t anything new. He’s been caught on camera doing it before:

According to Carroll: “I don’t always hit the garbage cans, sometimes they end up on the ground somewhere, but people ask me all the time about it. It’s one of the silliest questions, I don’t know why anybody would ever care.”

The stadium custodial crew, for one, comes to mind.