NFL Coaching and Broadcasting Career
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Many names have become synonymous with the sport of football throughout the game’s history, but you could make an argument that John Madden is perhaps the top name. From coaching a championship team in the NFL to having a long and successful broadcasting career, Madden is someone that we associate with football first and foremost. Though he’s been retired for quite some time now, Madden’s name is still just as known by those of all ages.
Madden was born on April 10, 1936 in the smaller city of Austin, Minnesota, but had spent most of his childhood in California’s Bay area. Madden grew up with a fondness for football and ended up playing in college, attending multiple universities. Madden had aspirations for the NFL, and ended up being selected in the 1958 NFL Draft by the Philadelphia Eagles. However, Madden suffered a serious injury in his first day of practice that forced him to retire, but he wanted to still be around football and went into coaching.
Madden got his coaching start in college, becoming an assistant and eventual head coach at Allan Hancock College in the early 1960s. During the middle part of the decade, Madden moved on to San Diego State University where he became a defensive coordinator before getting the call to become an NFL coach as an Oakland Raiders assistant in 1967. After two seasons, Madden got his crack at becoming an NFL head coach when the same team promoted him prior to the 1969 season.
The first season was a success for Madden, who finished with a record of 12-1-1 and the team nearly made the Super Bowl, coming up one game short. The same thing happened the following year as the winning team was just shy of making the big game. Ultimately, Madden coached with the Raiders for 10 seasons, never having a record that was lower than 8-4-2 beside his final season of 9-7, making it so that he never had a losing record. There were eight playoff appearances for the Raiders during this time, including a Super Bowl win in 1976 after the team finished 13-1, defeating the Minnesota Vikings. Overall, Madden’s coaching record was an astonishing 103-32-7.
Despite all of his success and still being quite young for an NFL head coach, Madden decided to retire after the 1978 season. “I gave it everything I have and just don’t have anything left,” Madden said. “I’m retiring from football coaching, and I’m never going to coach again in my life. This type of thing is easy to talk about, but it’s never easy to do.”
While coaching became too much for Madden to handle, he still had a love for the sport and switched over to broadcasting in that first year of retirement in his early 40s. Madden had worked as a color analyst in smaller games, but by the early 1980s, he and Pat Summerall became the top team on CBS Sports. After many years with the network, the broadcast duo made the switch to Fox Sports until 2002 when Summerall retired and Madden moved on to ABC to work Monday Night Football with Al Michaels, and that team also had a run with NBC on Sunday Night Football before Madden decided to hang up his broadcasting career in 2009.
Madden’s career as a coach was actually the least illustrious in terms of how he made money. As the top color analyst on television in the United States’s most popular sport, Madden was reeling in millions by working with multiple networks, especially when he was doing primetime football games on Sundays and Mondays. Madden has also lent his name to many endorsements like Tenactin, but it’s video games that have made up for a bulk of Madden’s wealth.
In 1988, Madden became the face of the video game franchise “John Madden Football”, which eventually became known simply as “Madden NFL” that is released on a yearly basis. The EA Sports franchise has grossed billions in sales throughout the years, and the game is now the only NFL video game on the market. This, of course, has helped Madden’s name to still be relevant long after retirement.
“My idea was that I wanted it to be a teaching tool,” Madden said of the video game franchise. Working with EA founder Trip Hawkins, “I had made up a book and film and I was thinking this computer will be another teaching tool for me,” he said. “That’s it. That was my idea. I thought high schools could use it to teach football and then if we got advanced enough maybe in college and in the pros. His idea was a computer game and my idea was a teaching tool, so we married the two and came up with the game that came out.”
Just because he’s no longer part of the game doesn’t mean that Madden has lost his passion for football, though. He said that every week during football season he really looks forward to watching every game. “I have this thing (that was built) where I have nine 63-inch monitors he said...I can watch (all games) at the same time. Then I’m going to see more. When I was broadcasting, I would just zero in on the game I was doing.”
Talking about his retirement that’s now gone on for more than a decade, he says that “I like to hear about what (other) people do,” he said. “That’s more interesting than talking about what...I do.” These days, Madden gets to spend time with his family, which includes children and grandchildren when he’s not watching football. “It’s like I won the lottery times 10,” Madden said of his life.
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