ShareThisTo be honest, I never drank the John Madden Kool-Aid. True, Madden and Pat Summerall, back in the day at both CBS and Fox, were probably the best and most enjoyable pro football announcing team ever.
In more recent years, though, I felt Madden became a master of the obvious and a shadow of his early self who failed to exert what could have been a considerable influence on the sport.
Perhaps because he was a master pitchman who probably earned more out of the booth than in it, where he made plenty, Madden was a see-no-evil, say-no-evil type.
He was supposed to be the color man, and the NFL is anything but vanilla. It has a string of storylines from steroid abuse to labor disputes, from egotistical jocks who say "me first" by their every action to serious issues regarding concussions and other injuries, from owners who make hundreds of millions of dollars to old-time players who live with chronic pain on the edge of poverty.
But Madden was content to use the telestrator to explain zone blitzes and pulling guards while introducing America to bus travel, turducken on Thanksgiving, and horse trailers on Sunday and Monday nights.
Where was the substance? He handled the games, which meant the same old stuff over and over, but not the sport.
Since Madden announced his retirement last week, I've given this some thought and, while not changing my mind that he was ineffective on many fronts and fairly removed from the top of his game in latter seasons, I grant you that he indeed departs a legend.
Madden revolutionized the role of analyst. In fact, while play-by-play men remain the stars on radio, where word pictures are still essential, Madden made analysts the stars of televised sports, where fans want insight on what they can easily see for themselves.
He wasn't the first to bring a coach's mentality to the booth, but he was the first to do it without taking himself too seriously. He was more of a fan who reached out to fellow fans and made it far easier for the laymen among us to understand the strategy behind the plays, to appreciate not only what we saw but also why we saw it.
There is a generation of Americans, though, who have little or no knowledge of Madden's credentials as a Super Bowl-winning coach and member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. This generation knows him only because of TV and fast-actin' Tinactin and mostly because of "Madden NFL Football," the video game that has sold 65 million copies in the last two decades. They are games that glorify violent hits and sack dances, which may be why Madden simply said "Boom!" and "Whap!" and little else in recent years.
What we might overlook, though, is that those video games turned millions of kids, albeit those who spend way too much time in front of TV and computer monitors, into NFL fans and that, in turn, helped the league become the giant among pro sports.
Now, Cris Collinsworth will become a giant. Arguably the best studio analyst in the game, he'll ascend to the biggest Sunday seat in the business. If you can get past his somewhat grating voice and occasional arrogant delivery, you'll find a guy who is candid, irreverent, humorous, and unafraid of the NFL's suits. He is everything Madden was not when it came to facing the issues and making waves. Change should be good.
Madden's final boss, Dick Ebersol, the head of NBC Sports, saluted his outgoing star as "absolutely the best sports broadcaster that ever lived."
That's an insult to too many tremendous broadcasters to name, but Madden was, as his most recent partner Al Michaels said, "The gold standard for analysts."
He may have become little more than an entertainer, void of much substance, by the end, but he nonetheless was the face of the NFL on television and a major contributor to our culture.
(Contact Dave Hackenberg at dhack@theblade.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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