Thank You John Madden

Calling it a career

John Madden has retired. After an all to brief career as a high school and college standout offensive lineman, a playing career cut short by a knee injury in 1958, John went immediately into coaching. By 1964 John was a defensive assistant to head coach Don Coryell at San Diego State, John stayed with Don and the Aztecs for four years, his colleague all four of those year at SDSU? One Joe Gibbs.

John moved to the Oakland Raiders in 1967 as linebacker coach, in two years he was the NFL's youngest head coach at 32. In his first seven seasons as Raiders head coach, John's teams lost five AFC Championship games. Finally in his eighth season the Raiders won the big one, Super Bowl 11 over Fran Tarkenton's Minnesota Vikings.

The next season John's Raiders lost the AFC Championship, Oakland's seventh appearance in that game in John's nine years. One more season in 1978 and John called it quits from the sideline.

As he did in the transition from player to coach, John moved immediately to his new endeavor, broadcasting. By 1981 John was paired with Pat Summerall, calling NFC Sunday afternoon games. It is during this time that I came to know John Madden. John's former coaching colleague Joe Gibbs rose with the Redskins as John rose in the booth. Many Sundays for me in high school John and Pat called Redskins games and with his ability to advertise anything, John truly became a household name in the 80s.

When NFC coverage moved from CBS to Fox in 1995, John moved with it, working Sunday games until 2002 when John left Fox to move into the Monday Night Football booth with Al Michaels. After four years on MNF, John moved again, to NBC to cover Sunday night games, working three seasons from 2006 to 2008. Last season when John surprised football fans by taking a week off, little did we know he was ending a 476-week streak in the booth.

At the end John had become something of a caricature of himself, with the banging and the booming and the stuff hanging out, and eighty percent of anything John said was something you had already heard him say, and therefore had also heard every little Madden say, from Matt Millen to Tim Ryan to Brian Baldinger to Randy Cross.

But if you were a football fan and you listened to John, every game you got some new nugget, some insight into the game, the positions or the personalities.

John Madden changed the way NFL games are consumed by people watching television, and it is people watching television that make up the most marketable segment of football fans. He made the networks happy, he made the viewers happy and he did it all from the position of experience in the game. As a football fan I am happy I got to see him in his prime.


New York Times on John Madden's retirement. | A hilarious piece confirming John will not be joining the Raiders as a consultant, as if John was fool enough to get near the 2009 version of Al Davis with a ten foot telestrator.



Madden 93 for SNES, a game I played around the clock for a year, from here.