That John Madden, who died yesterday at the age of 85, was enormously popular was easy to see while he was alive, and has been even easier to see now that he’s gone. But what may not be quite as obvious about Madden is that he was more than a beloved, avuncular figure. He was, in his way, a visionary, someone who had his finger on the proverbial pulse of modern pop culture, someone with deep sense of what people wanted, sometimes even before they knew it. And he was able to take that understanding of what people wanted, and use it to transform sports video games and sports television in a way that no other single figure has.
Madden was an exceptional explainer, both when he was a football coach and when he was a television announcer, and one of the things that makes someone a great explainer is the ability to understand their audience, to grasp where the audience is and where you can move it to. And what Madden grasped about football fans is that they had an unslaked appetite for insider knowledge of the game. He recognized that you could talk about the nitty-gritty details of a football game, including things like offensive-line play, without people losing interest, as long as you were able to make those details intelligible to the average fan.
He brought the same approach to the video game series that truly made him a legend. The famous origin story of EA’s Madden series is that when EA first talked to him about putting his name on a football video game, the company wanted to make the game 7v7, because that would make it easier to produce a workable game, given the limits of processing power and computer memory at the time. Madden rejected that idea out of hand, saying it had to be 11v11, just like real football, or nothing. When he was told that that could take years, he said, in effect, “Then it’ll take years.” And so it did.
It was that same ethos that led him to argue for having the game include NFL playbooks that were as big and as realistic as possible, and, for years, to personally review player ratings. Even if the goal wasn’t to make a perfectly accurate simulation (a typical game of Madden is likely to have more big plays than a typical NFL game), Madden recognized that fans would want something that at least felt real. Where previous sports games had tried to keep things simple in the interests of making games as playable as possible, Madden saw that, done right, complexity was something to lean into rather than away from.
That understanding of fans’ willingness to embrace analytical complexity and depth also led Madden to reshape the way NFL broadcasts were prepared for and the way they looked. Before Madden, announcers didn’t go to practices before games, and didn’t get to watch the game film that coaches did. When he became a broadcaster, he said immediately that this made no sense — if he was going to add value as a commentator, he needed to be able to do the work that would let him understand, in a deep sense, what he was seeing on the field, so that he could then translate that for the people at home. So he insisted on having access to game films, and going to practices in the days ahead of Sunday games. In effect, he prepared for each game he broadcast the way he would have prepared for a Sunday game as coach (with the added advantage of getting to watch both teams practice). And within a short period of time, all broadcasters were preparing for games this way.
Madden was also a pioneer in the use of technology. He was, famously, the first sports broadcaster to use a Telestrator, which he did during the 1982 Super Bowl. Back then Telestrator technology was much cruder than it is today, and one might well have been skeptical that audiences would want to watch someone draw lines all over their TV screen. But Madden recognized that the Telestrator could help, in a sense, bring order out of the seeming chaos of a football play. It could help viewers see what they were watching.
Madden was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first person to suggest that TV networks put a yellow line across the field at the first-down marker, to make it easy for people to see how far the offense had to go to get a new set of downs. He was told it was impossible, and that people wouldn’t like having this big line cluttering up the screen anyway. But he was, of course, right, and a few years later, the yellow line made its first appearance — though it was ESPN, and not Fox, where Madden then worked, that first introduced. Today, it’s one of those innovations that’s so integral to the way a football game looks on TV that you barely notice it.
There are lots of reasons the NFL has, over the last forty years, become one of the few unstoppable forces in American culture, and one of the few things in popular culture that transcends partisan and geographic and demographic differences. John Madden is one of those reasons — and not a small one. Football — as I’ve realized from trying to explain to my little boys how the game works — is a very complicated game, much more so than baseball or basketball. What Madden did was make the game comprehensible to people, not by dumbing it down, but by breaking it down into explainable parts. He had the knack for making things as simple as they needed to be, but no simpler. People did not love Madden just because he was a big, jovial guy. They loved him because he helped them understand the game, and in the process helped them appreciate it more deeply (and feel a little smarter, too). He was, in that sense, a kind of genius, and pretty much anyone involved with the NFL today owes him a big debt.
