RIP John Madden

RIP to a legend

it is odd in that story that they say he died "unexpectedly" (at 85?), he had been out of the public eye for long enough that i just kind of assumed he wasn't well.

obviously incredibly important to generations' worth of people who watched football, and he hasn't been exceeded or replaced.

boom!

that’s what we like to call “the decleater”

this take resonated with me:

madden was somehow both the guy who cared more about football than any other TV guy and yet also understood that the way to cover it involved eating twice stuffed meats on a bus instead of covering it like a tense standoff between the united states and soviet union at the UN

— BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) December 29, 2021

My favorite sportscaster. Bar none

Fox just aired a documentary 'All Madden' on Christmas day. There is plenty of good stuff in the documentary, but I thought it was a bit slight in a way. Madden definitely can be filed in the list of people that seemed to learn how to live. Kind of wild to think he was the youngest coach to win a Superbowl and retired from coaching at age 42.

I remember Summerall was doing a promo for COPS and Madden goes “Now the thing with that show is, the guy who doesn't have his shirt on? That's the guy who did it.” #RIP

— Drew Magary (@drewmagary) December 29, 2021

lmao that's perfect

raiders’ first afc championship came 45 years ago today (they went on to crush the vikings in sb xi)

lmao just destroyed aikman's facial hair

John Madden, the G.O.A.T. pic.twitter.com/dnEvOnF6ZY

— Jon Machota (@jonmachota) December 29, 2021

bummed. even though I'm afraid to admit he kinda falls under "people you didn't know were still alive" territory. totally agree with the tweet above, he figured out the perfect way to call a football game. he got what made this sport such stupid fun.

I enjoyed when, in the early 2000s, when just about every starting RB in the league got 1,000 yards, he kept calling out the poor performance of run defenses and specifically why they were giving up buckets of yards to mediocre backs. he even pointed out that Ricky Williams (who would have 1854 yards in the season) was benefiting from poor defensive scheming and execution against the Bears, and that the 60+ yard runs he ripped off during the game shouldn't have happened. and was consistent on challenging the ever-changing definition of fumbles.

my friend and I used to play each other on Madden religiously and we always used to recite out loud some of his choice sayings on the game, particularly "now WHY would the receiver run a route that DOESN'T go past the first down marker?!"

his voice is really fun on NFL Blitz too whenever you go for it on 4th and 34 he says "I gotta tell ya something I like this call here"

rip big man, gonna rescreen THE SECOND BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL (2015) tonight in tribute

since I've seen this come up on Twitter a few times, this is a pretty against-the-grain take for 1993

For all the clout-chasing Twitter Docs trying to leverage someone’s death into misguided narratives, here’s John Madden on concussions in 1993 pic.twitter.com/N994Km3xli

— Will Brinson (@WillBrinson) December 29, 2021

also wanna talk a bit about Jim McMahon's headshot there

Just got back from lighting a candle at the makeshift vigil they've set up at Ace Hardware.

i want a supercut of every time he drew on the screen with the digital pen

like when he explained the tethers on the indoor camera blimp, or went on a tear about seagulls & was drawing circles around them

searching for madden videos is unsurprisingly pretty much impossible.