Sunday, Aug. 16 (PM) – I like Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll. I like him a lot, in fact. He’s come a long ways since his days as the 28-year-old secondary coach on first-year Ohio State head coach Earle Bruce’s staff in 1979. He’ll turn 64 just as the 2015 NFL regular season is beginning, yet he looks, acts, talks and thinks as if he’s 44 – as if he’s drinking out of the Fountain of Youth. He’s a breath of fresh air among NFL head coaches, most of whom won’t admit even the time of day lest it be viewed as providing a competitive advantage for their next opponent. Geeessshhh! Lighten up, Francis! Indeed, there is no coach-speak in the coach of the defending NFC champions. He’s as upbeat and personable as the day is long. Not only does he think out of the box in every aspect of both his professional and personal lives, but he also doesn’t even know where the box is, or if there ever was a box. To him, the glass is always – always — half-full, and that’s how it should be for all of us. No moping, never. But despite all that, I still had to chuckle at a recent copy of Sports Illustrated with a smiling, cheery, positive-looking Carroll pictured on the cover. The tag line with the photo for the accompanying feature story inside is, “Pete Carroll Won’t Be Haunted by His Super Bowl Decision.” There is also a quote from Carroll: “It’s much easier for me to move forward than most people.” Carroll can be determined with all his might, not to be haunted by his Super Bowl decision. And perhaps he is right in that it’s easier for him to move forward than most people. But if Carroll thinks for one second – for even one milli-second, really – that his Super Bowl decision will not only haunt him until his dying day, but also that it will define him in many ways long after he’s gone, he’s absolutely out of his mind. That decision will be attached to his hip forever. Every time he turns around, it will be there staring him in the face. The more he tries to get rid of it, to get away from it, the more it will cling to him and get in his way. If it were simply a tattoo, he could have it removed. No big deal. But it’s not just on his skin but rather part of it, like a freckle, blemish or birthmark. Try as you might, you can’t scrub those things off. The Super Bowl decision, of course, is the one he made at the end of Super Bowl XLIX last Feb. 1 when, from the New England 1 and with Seattle behind 28-24, he eschews the run even though Marshawn Lynch had run over several Patriots on a four-yard rumble on the previous play, and decides to pass. Russell Wilson’s throw at the goal line is intercepted by cornerback Malcolm Butler, who saw the play coming all the way – like an approaching frright train — and the Seahawks are denied a second consecutive Super Bowl victory. In the SI story, Carroll once again gave his reason for why he did what he did – something about the Seahawks wanted to run as many plays as possible and that an incompletion would stop the clock, and that they had identified that the Patriots had made themselves vulnerable to the pass by inserting their goal-line defense. But the fact of the matter is that Carroll should have run the ball. It was the common-sense thing to do – by a country mile. To do anything else would have been dumb. How dumb? It has been called the single-worst decision in NFL championship game history. Yikes! That seems appropriate, though. OK, OK, that’s all well and good, but what’s the connection to the Browns? After all, the title of these pieces is “A Daily Dose of the Browns,” not “A Daily Dose of the Seahawks.” That’s an easy one to answer. Ever hear of Red Right 88? Of course you have if you’re reading this. It is the play Sam Rutigliano, the head coach of the Kardiac Kids, called near the end of the Browns’ 1980 AFC divisional playoff game against the Oakland Raiders at Cleveland Stadium. Working from the Oakland 13 in the waning seconds and with his team trailing 14-12, quarterback Brian Sipe had his pass to tight end Ozzie Newsome intercepted in the end zone by nickel cornerback Mike Davis. And with that, the Kardiac Kids suffered a fatal heart attack. Rutigliano said that with the day-long problems experienced by his kicker, Don Cocoroft, who, with an aching back that had bothered him all year, had missed two field-goal attempts, had an extra-point try blocked and had another attempt go haywire because of a poor snap on a brutally cold day that made kicking nearly impossible, he decided to take a shot at the end zone. “I had the NFL MVP that year in Brian Sipe, and I wanted to try to score a touchdown to win the game,” Rutigliano, now 84 years young and still going strong, said from his Waite Hill home in the far eastern Cleveland suburbs early Sunday afternoon. “That’s the difference between what I did and what Pete Carroll did. I had the best player in the league that season trying to make a play. The Seahawks had gained four yards on the play before and didn’t try to run it again. That – my decision — was the right thing to do. A field goal, even from that close range, was not a gimme.” Yes, that all makes sense. In fact, Rutigliano’s decision makes more sense with each passing year – now 35 and counting. But perception is 90 percent of reality, and the perception immediately afterwards, and still today as strongly as ever, is that Rutigliano should not have risked a pass. Woody Hayes used to say that when you pass, only three things can happen, and two of them are bad. Woody was right. Rutigliano should have run the ball into the middle of the field to position it nicely for Cockroft, one of the best Browns kickers of all-time, to boot the game-winner, even if his back was killing him. “Don plays around with that decision a lot, but throwing the ball was still the right thing to do,” Rutigliano said. In 2003, the Browns brought the Kardiac Kids back to town to honor them before a game. In the days leading up to that, Rutigliano and some of the former players appeared at a press conference at Browns Headquarters. When the topic of Red Right 88 came up – which took all of about two seconds – Cockroft, sitting in the back of the room, interrupted Rutigliano’s explanation by saying loudly, “We should have kicked a field goal!” He was only half-kidding. Indeed, Cockroft, who is fiercely proud, has never forgotten that play. Though he was a stellar performer in his 13-year career and hit a number of game-winners, it is still that kick – or lack thereof – that defines him. He never got to try another field goal. He was cut at the end of the 1981 training camp and retired shortly thereafter. It was a bitter culmination to a great career. Cockroft and Rutigliano are strange bedfellows now – great friends, really – as they go around together doing book signing for Cockroft’s book on the Kardiac Kids written several years ago. They joke about Red Right 88 when a visitor brings it up, which happens all the time, but just as Rutigliano won’t move off his long-held contention, neither will Cockroft move off his. Cockroft tells the story of an elderly woman getting in his face once and scowling, “They should have let you kick the field goal!” As bad as it has been for Cockroft over the years, it must be remembered that he is being scrutinized for something he didn’t do – never was allowed to do – and there’s only so much scrutiny that can be done in such a situation. For Rutigliano, he is being scrutinized for something he did do, which is make that play call. There’s substance there to look at and analyze. And that scrutiny has followed him around the world. While coaching in NFL Europe years after he had been fired by the Browns midway through the 1984 season, ending his 6½-year run, Rutigliano and his wife, Barbara, were minding their own business while taking a walk along a street in Australia. “This woman walks past us the other way, and she’s staring at me as she does,” Rutigliano said. “She quickly turns around and catches up to us. She looked me right in the eye and in a very agitated tone says, ‘You should have kicked the field goal!’ Here I come to find out that she’s from Cleveland and a big Browns fan. I can’t get away from Red Right 88. Even in other countries, I can’t get away from it.” That lament comes from a former NFL head coach, something that Carroll should keep in mind as he promises to quickly and effortlessly distance himself from the veritable speed bump that he considers his Super Bowl decision to be. Hardly. It’s much more like a Grand Canyon-sized chuckhole from which he will likely never escape, no matter how hard he tries, because there’s simply no way out.