The best part about Vegas hiring Pete Carroll has nothing to do with actual football

The Las Vegas Raiders are the latest team to put an end to their head coaching search, reportedly reaching an agreement with former Super Bowl champion Pete Carroll on Friday morning. While Carroll's tenure with the Seattle Seahawks didn't end well, it's easy to see why Vegas was interested in giving him a second chance: He's won just about everywhere he's been, remains an excellent developer of defensive talent, and he's an instant culture-setter, something this franchise could desperately use after so many years in the wilderness.

All of which is well and good. But with all due respect to how Carroll might help the Raiders on the field, it's important that we keep our eye on the prize here. Carroll's hire doesn't just bring one of football's most storied coaches back to the league; it also promises to renew one of football's spiciest and most hilarious rivalries, and that's something we should all be grateful for.

Pete Carroll set to renew rivalry with Jim Harbaugh after taking Raiders job

In hindsight, of course Carroll was destined to wind up in Vegas. The Raiders, after all, share a division with the Los Angeles Chargers, the team currently coached by Jim Harbaugh. And as much as both coaches would probably like to be rid of each other, the football gods have always found a way to make sure they cross paths as much as possible — often to hilarious effect.

The history between these two dates all the way back to their college days, when Harbaugh took over at Stanford. While the Cardinal had long been a Pac-12 doormat, Carroll's USC was in the penthouse, winning at least a share of the conference title every year from 2002 through 2008. But all of that changed when Harbaugh arrived in Palo Alto in 2007 ... and promptly came into the Coliseum and shocked the No. 2-ranked Trojans behind a backup quarterback.

The rivalry really heated up two years later, when Harbaugh's Stanford blasted Carroll's Trojans, 55-21 — a win so resounding that Carroll even confronted his counterpart during the postgame handshake, immediately entering the phrase "what's your deal, man?" into the college football lexicon. That would be Carroll's final season at USC; he bolted for the Seahawks at the end of the 2009 season, seemingly putting Harbaugh behind him for good.

Or so he thought. In January of 2011, Harbaugh took the San Francisco 49ers job, ensuring that he and Carroll would duke it out at least two times each year. And just about every single one of them was memorable, with Harbaugh's salty Niners team challenging the Legion of Boom for NFC West supremacy. Seahawks corner Richard Sherman, who played for Harbaugh at Stanford, called his old coach a bully, and teammate Brandon Browner even went so far as to say that he wanted to "put his hands around Harbaugh's neck".

In all, the two teams met 11 times in Harbaugh's five years with San Francisco, with Seattle holding the slight 6-5 edge — including, most memorably, a win over the 49ers in the 2013 NFC Championship game en route to the franchise's first-ever Super Bowl title. The two did seem to bury the hatchet after their final matchup in 2014, but here's betting that it won't be too long until they remember what they hated about each other in the first place.