The Sports Xchange

Hall of Fame coach and broadcaster John Madden thinks Pete Carroll’s Super Bowl call will “torment” the Seattle Seahawks coach forever.

Madden said the memory won’t get any easier with time for Carroll, who has acknowledged he would always regret the decision to pass at the goal line rather than run in Seattle’s 28-24 loss to the New England Patriots.

“That will torment him forever,” Madden told Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times during an interview that covered a wide range of topics. “Winning one game is hard. Getting to the Super Bowl is hard. Then getting that close and losing has to be tough, because we only remember the winners of the Super Bowl.

“One of the biggest gaps in sports is the difference between the winning and losing teams of the Super Bowl. They don’t invite the losing team to the White House. They don’t have parades for them. They don’t throw confetti on them.

“Does it haunt you? Hell yes, it haunts you. I’m still haunted by some championship games.”

Madden’s Oakland Raiders, who lost five conference championship games in seven years, won Super Bowl XI over the Minnesota Vikings in the 1976 season.

The 79-year-old Madden, who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006, talked about other topics — including Deflategate — during the hour-long interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Madden spends part of his time in San Francisco and has a condominium less than a mile from where NFL owners just had their annual spring meetings.

Madden was asked what other rules changes the owners should consider after voting to move back extra-point kicks.

“I don’t know when they’ll ever do anything about this, but you know those gloves receivers wear? It’s making it very easy to catch a ball,” he said. “You see more one-handed catches where guys are pushing off with the other hand. No one looks at those gloves. I saw them when I was at a meeting in Indy. They passed them around and somebody made the comment that, ‘Pretty soon, these gloves are going to be able to catch a ball without a hand in them.'”

Madden weighed in on what changes Deflategate will bring to the NFL.

“The league will change some protocol about the handling of game balls,” he said. “Here’s the thing that’s bigger than that: there’s a lot of people that have jobs that can affect the game, winning and losing, that are dayworkers. I think the game has gotten big enough now that we have to start eliminating some of these part-time guys and make them full-time guys.

“The guys who handle the footballs, the guy who handles the clock, the chain gang. We’re big enough now to have full-time officials too.”